“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(First, after holding session 805 we took a six-week break from sessions of any kind. We didn’t plan to do this; it just developed, and we eventually realized that it did so through Jane’s simple need for a change in routine. We had plenty of other things to do: I was still occupied daily with writing notes and appendixes for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality; on June 4 Jane received the page proofs for Cézanne, and began correcting them for the printer; on the 14th of the month “our” contractor began converting half of our garage into a writing room for Jane, and adding a large back porch [see the end of Note 2 for Session 801]. All of that building activity was much noisier and more disruptive than the work had been for the front porch, and forced some changes in our schedules, including more night work, as we manipulated around those distractions.

(Going back to the end of our stay-at-home vacation, on June 25 Seth-Jane began delivering a series of 10 sessions that we held on Monday and Saturday evenings for a change, instead of following our usual Monday-Wednesday routine. We finally decided to classify these sessions as private, or at least as not being work for Mass Events. Some of that material is intensely personal, and some only generally so. But a lot of it isn’t intimate at all — meaning that it could help others if it were published. This realization brought up questions we’ve encountered before: Which sessions apply to a particular project, and which ones don’t? What if they’re related in oblique ways, yet Seth doesn’t call them book dictation? I may not realize I should ask him about this at the time, or only later begin to speculate about using certain material. We know that Seth will specify a given number of sessions for this book, for instance, yet we keep the freedom to consider adding other material.

The moment it occurs, it begins to change as it is filtered through all of those other ingredients, and it is minutely altered furthermore by each succeeding event. The memory of an event, then, is shaped as much by the present as it is by the past. Association triggers memories, of course, and organizes memory events. It also helps color and form such events.

(10:01.) The memory, left alone, not structured, will shimmer, shake, take other forms, and transform itself before your [mental] eyes, so that its shape will seem like a psychological kaleidoscope through whose focus the other events of your life will also shimmer and change. Such a memory exercise can also serve to bring in other-life memories. Edges, corners, and reflections will appear, however, perhaps superimposed upon memories that you recognize as belonging to this life.

Dreams in which past and present are both involved are an example; also dreams in which the future and the past merge, and dreams in which time seems to be a changing ingredient.

Any such moment is therefore a gateway into all of your existence. The events that you recognize as happening now are simply specific and objective, but the most minute element in any given moment’s experience is also symbolic of other events and other times. Each moment is then like a mosaic, only in your current life history you follow but one color or pattern, and ignore the others. As I have mentioned [in other books], you can indeed change the present to some extent by purposefully altering a memory event. That kind of synthesis can be used in many instances with many people.

Such an exercise is not some theoretical, esoteric, impractical method, but a very precise, volatile, and dynamic way of helping the present self by calming the fears of a past self. That past self is not hypothetical, either, but still exists, capable of being reached and of changing its reactions. You do not need a time machine to alter the past or the future.

Such a technique is highly valuable. Not only are memories not “dead,” they are themselves ever-changing. Many alter themselves almost completely without your notice. In his (unpublished) apprentice novels, Ruburt (Jane) did two or three versions of an episode with a priest he had known in his youth. Each version at the time he wrote it represented his honest memory of the event. While the bare facts were more or less the same, the entire meaning and interpretation of each version differed so drastically that those differences far outweighed the similarities.

Because the episode was used on two or three different occasions, Ruburt could see how this memory changed. In most cases, however, people are not aware that memory changes in such a fashion, or that the events they think they recall are so different.