“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Young people are urged to tackle life aggressively, but in the usage of the term this means competitively. It also implies, and of course, promotes, the direction of individual consciousness in an exterior fashion only. Not only is consciousness to be focused to the external reality, but within those limits it is still further harnessed toward certain specific goals. Other inclinations are frowned upon.

(A long pause at 10:06.) The brain can be called simply the physical counterpart of the mind. By means of the brain the functions of the soul and intellect are connected with the body. Through the characteristics of the brain, events that are of nonphysical origin become physically valid. There is a definite filtering and focusing effect at work, then. Practically speaking, you do indeed form the appearance that reality takes through your conscious beliefs. Those beliefs are used as screening and directing agents, separating certain nonphysical probable events from others, and bringing them into three-dimensional actuality.

In surface terms the sense of “I” that you possess is the result of constantly emerging probable identities, given continuity in time through the physical apparatus of the body with its built-in intervals of nerve reaction. You only remember the portion of your identity that is physically realized — those portions that are drawn into corporeal pattern. (With gestures, and forcefully.) This is the result of the focusing and yet limiting behavior of the physical brain, for effective survival behavior in your reality depends upon time reactions. The nerve patterns’ activity therefore causes the illusion of a present, in which your consciousness appears focused and alert.

You can dip into cellular memory, for example. Using memory, you follow but one recognized sequence of remembered events backward. There are elements in your past that are as unpredictable, however, as the elements in your future now appear to be (emphatically). There is creativity in your past waiting for you even as there is in your future, but to utilize such experiences you must learn to alter your beliefs, and to some degree escape from the particular kind of limited conscious focus that you habitually use.