“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(Pause.) In certain terms time intervals are jumped, as when a “past” smell or sight is suddenly perceived with present vividness, though you would say it has already occurred in the past. Under particular conditions a memory may suddenly become more real than the event of the present moment, and so rush again into your current experience as validly as when it was first lived, and even seem to blot out the occurrences of the moment.

This could not happen if your physical structure did not have built-in mechanisms allowing it to, and if under certain conditions the normal intervals between the synapses of the nerve cells could not be leaped in a different fashion. In the same way, a future experience may also be physically perceived in your present. Now beneath your usual consciousness, your physical organism can react to future events without your knowledge, as it can to past ones. In such cases the intensity of the initially nonphysical event is enough to break through normal neuronal patterns.