“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As your cells have their own memories, so the conscious mind has a more overt kind of memory. Your conscious thoughts act as triggers, bringing both kinds of memory into activation. Within your physical being then each joyful, expanding, traumatic and tragic “past” event lies indelibly written. In your terms this is your working material, the memory of your physical being since the time of its conception in corporeal form. There are [in your memory] the most complex organizations and associative frameworks, that exist both in the depths of your cellular structure and in the highest reaches of your conscious activity.

Earlier I compared your thoughts to viruses (in the last session). Think of them now as living electromagnetic cells, differing from the physical cells in your body only in the nature of their materialization. Your thoughts direct the overall functioning of your body’s cells, even though you do not consciously know how those cells operate. That work is unconscious.

There is a built-in equilibrium to some extent. The body is so responsive to conscious thought that it has its own innate system of self-preservation and its own guiding image of fulfillment.

There were countless other events that happened to you on different afternoons at the same hour, both before and after that one. The cells within your hand contain within themselves memories your conscious mind would be dazzled to behold. Yet remember that the cells in your twenty-seven-year-old hand are in no physical way the same cells that experienced any of those events. In some underground of sensation, however, the buried evidences of stimuli and reaction experienced during those numberless “past” afternoons still exist. Some of those memories will certainly be played back, to affect what you think of as your current experience at twenty-seven. Your conscious thoughts and habits regulate which of them will intermix into the maelstrom of the present.

You consciously give the signals for reaction. It is not the other way around. Past events do not intrude in this manner unless they are beckoned by the conscious expectations and thoughts that exist within your mind. (Pause.) Those unconscious memories will be activated according to your current beliefs. You will be replenished and renewed as your thoughts motivate joyful body sensations and physical events, or you will be depressed as you bring into your awareness unpleasant past body happenings.

At times of course both can be highly beneficial. A conscious realization of danger, for example, will call up all information dealing with similar situations, so that the body can deal with it at once from the vast bank of its living memory. But constant unpleasant thoughts put the body into a state of turmoil that is “unrealistic,” and, in turn, force it to reactivate such old patterns.

Now: Because you are conscious of being, you form your physical reality through conscious thought.

(10:40. During break Jane received some insights from Seth as to what would follow in Chapter Eight — that, for instance, when good thoughts from an individual’s present life were activated, they would draw upon similar ones from his or her reincarnational personalities. This was a very interesting idea, aside from being a comforting one. I couldn’t recall Seth presenting the concept in just that way before. [A note added later: But as things developed, he didn’t begin alluding to it until Chapter Ten.]

1. According to scientists, viruses are ultramicroscopic units that can cause diseases in plants and animals. They multiply only in connection with live cells, and are thought of both as living organisms and as complicated proteins. Few scientists would grant thoughts the same kind of validity, though.