“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A new belief in the present, however, can cause changes in the past on a neuronal level. You must understand that basically time is simultaneous. Present beliefs can indeed alter the past. In some cases of healing, in the spontaneous disappearance of cancer, for instance, or of any other disease, certain alterations are made that affect cellular memory, genetic codes, or neuronal patterns in the past.

(Pause at 10:01.) A sudden or intense belief in health can indeed “reverse” a disease, but in a very practical way it is a reversal in terms of time. New memories are inserted in place of the old ones, as far as cells are concerned under such conditions. This kind of therapy happens quite frequently on a spontaneous basis when people rid themselves of diseases they do not even know they possess.

Learning is not simply passed on from living tissue to living tissue — this your biologists have discovered — but it is also passed on through the body’s present corporeal reality, sometimes entirely changing the messages to past cells, that in your terms no longer exist.

In somewhat the same way, a strong belief in a particular ability generated in the present will reach into the past and effect whatever changes would have had to occur there (with gestures) in order to now make the ability apparent.

This is the reason for the results of some experiments being conducted abroad, in which accelerated learning takes place, when under hypnosis or otherwise a present individual is convinced that he or she is, for example, a great painter, or a linguist. The present belief activates “latent” abilities within each person.¹

(Pause.) The biological structure as it existed in the past is therefore affected. Experience is built into the organism that it did not have before, in your terms. It is a sort of reprogramming. It is impossible, of course, for you to examine cellular structure now as it exists in the present and simultaneously as it existed in the past (very positively). Scientifically, you can only probe those effects that appear within your present. When you alter your beliefs today you also reprogram your past. As far as you are concerned the present is your point of action, focus, and power, and from that point of volition you form both your future and past. Realizing this, you will understand that you are not at the mercy of a past over which you have no control.

While your present conscious beliefs dictate your current experience, and while your physical body wears its solidity only in present time to your senses, beneath this both the ever-changing elements of your body and your consciousness are relatively free in time. They exist in a multidimensionality with which rational consciousness is not yet equipped to deal.

This is not meant to dilute the function or natural abilities of reasoning awareness, for its powers allow you to focus experience in a highly specific manner, and to direct energy with great purposeful attention. (Pause.) In your terms, this action is in the process of automatically changing the nature of rational consciousness — which is, as you think of it, in a state of evolution.

Your consciousness is not a thing that you possess. Your individuality is not a thing with limits. If you ask, “What is my individuality in all of this?” or, “Which ‘I’ am I?” then you are automatically thinking of yourself as a psychological entity with definite boundaries that must be protected at all costs. You may say, “I was born in a house on a certain street in a certain town, and no present belief to the contrary will change that fact.” If, in the present, one past event can be altered within your neuronal structure, however, then basically no event is safe from such change.

Yet at other levels this seeming solidity of events also breaks down. Which you? Which world? A sudden contemporary belief in illness will actually reach back into the past, affecting the organism at that level, and inserting into the past experience of the cells the initiation of those biological events that will then seem to give birth to a present disease.

Cellular memory can be changed at any point. Present beliefs can insert into the past new memory, both psychologically and physically. The future is in no way predetermined on basic levels. This does not mean that the future cannot be predicted sometimes, for in practical terms you will often continue with certain lines of probability which can be seen “ahead of time.”

Such predictions can affect the probabilities, of course, and reinforce a present line of belief. Physicians often wonder whether they should tell terminal patients of their impending deaths. There is great controversy. In some cases such a prediction can make death a fact — while its opposite can regenerate the patient’s belief in his or her own ability to live.

No man will die simply because a physician tells him he is going to, however. No one is so at the mercy of another’s beliefs. Each individual, generally speaking, knows his challenges and overall programs, and the time of his death. But even such decisions can be altered at any time in your “now” — the entire body can be regenerated in a way that would be impossible to predict in usual medical terms. (See the 624th session in Chapter Five.)

You rule your experiences from the focal point of your present, where your beliefs directly intercept with the body and the physical world on the one hand, and the invisible world from which you draw your energy and strength on the other. This applies to individuals, societies, races and nations, and to sociological, biological and psychic activities.

In daily practical experience, try to concentrate for a while upon seemingly subordinate abilities, ones that you think of as latent. If you do so consistently, using your imagination and will, then those abilities will become prominent in your present. The current beliefs will reprogram and alter past experience. It is not simply that past, forgotten, unconsciously perceived events will be put together in a new way and organized under a new heading, but that in that past (now not perceivable), the entire bodily response to seemingly past events will change.

(Very forcefully, if with many pauses:) Your desire or belief will literally be reaching back into time, teaching the nerves new tricks. Definite reorganizations in that past will occur in your present, allowing you to behave in entirely new fashions.