“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is not quite as simple a matter as just deciding what events you want to materialize as reality, since you have, in your terms, a body of probabilities of one kind or another already established as the raw materials for the coming year. It would be quite improbable for you, Joseph (as Seth calls me), to suddenly turn into a tailor, for example, for none of your choices with probabilities have led toward such an action.

In like manner, England in all probability next year will not suddenly turn into a Mohammedan nation. But within the range of workable probabilities, private and mass choices, the people of the world are choosing their probable 1980s.

Any of the probable actions that a person considers are a part of that person’s conscious thought. Just underneath, however, people also consider other sets of probabilities that may or may not reach conscious level, simply because they are shunted aside, or because they seem to meet with no conscious recognition. I want you to try and imagine actual events, as you think of them, to be (pause) the vitalized representations of probabilities—that is, as the physical versions of mental probabilities. The probabilities with which you are not consciously concerned remain psychologically peripheral: They are there but not there, so to speak.

Your conscious mind can only accept a certain sequence of probabilities as recognized experience. As I have said, the choices among probabilities go on constantly, both on conscious and unconscious levels. Events that you do not perceive as conscious experience are (pause) a part of your unconscious experience, however, to some extent. This applies to the individual, and of course en masse the same applies to world events. Each action seeks all of its own possible fulfillments. All That Is seeks all possible experience, but in such a larger framework in this case that questions of, say, pain or death simply do not apply, though [certainly] they do on the physical level (all quite forcefully).

The true power is in the imagination which dares to speculate upon that which is not yet (intently). The imagination, backed by great expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of probabilities. All of the possible versions of 1980 will happen. Except for those you settle upon, all of the others will remain psychologically peripheral, in the background of your conscious experience—but all of those possible versions will be connected in one way or another.

The important lessons have never really appeared in your societies: the most beneficial use of the directed will, with great expectations, and that coupled with the knowledge of Framework 1 and 2 activities. Very simply: You want something, you dwell upon it consciously for a while, you consciously imagine it coming to the forefront of probabilities, closer to your actuality. Then you drop it like a pebble into Framework 2, forget about it as much as possible for a fortnight, and do this in a certain rhythm.

In the most basic of terms, as 1980 happens the energy that comes into your universe is as new as if (in your terms) the world were created yesterday—a point that will be rather difficult to explain. All of the probable versions of 1980 spin off their own probable pasts as well as their own probable futures, and any consciousness that exists in 1980 was (again in those terms) a part of what you think of as the beginning of the world.

(To me:) Your mother did not simply choose to believe, in her old age, in a different past than the one that was accepted by the family—she effectively changed probabilities. She was not deluded or obsessed. Her memory in that regard, now, was not defective: It was the memory of the probable woman that she became.²

Like the entire American hostage affair (in Iran), any physical event serves as a focus that attracts all of its probable versions and outcomes. The hostage situation (now in day 53) is a materialized mass dream, meant to be important and vital on political and religious platforms of reality, meant to dramatize a conflict of beliefs, and to project that conflict outward into the realm of public knowledge. Everyone involved was consciously and unconsciously a willing participant at the most basic levels of human behavior, and it is of course no coincidence that 1980 is immediately foreshadowed by that event. What will the world do with it?

Do not personally give any more conscious consideration, either of you, to events that you do not want to happen. (Long pause.) Any such concentration, to whatever degree, ties you in with those probabilities, so concentrate upon what you want, and as far as public events are concerned, take it for granted that sometimes even men are wiser than they know.

“Four: I will realize that the future is a probability. In terms of ordinary experience, nothing exists there yet. It is virgin territory, planted by my feelings and thoughts in the present. Therefore I will plant accomplishments and successes, and I will do this by remembering that nothing can exist in the future that I do not want to be there.”

2. Here Seth referred to the striking way in which my mother, Stella Butts, had recreated for the better her “memories” of her husband (my father). Robert Butts, Sr., died in February 1971, 34 months before she did. All of the members of the Butts family observed the pronounced changes in Stella’s thinking about her husband, although Jane and I were the only ones who ascribed those changes to her moving into another probable reality.