“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.

In such instances there is, as easily as I can explain it, a reaching into deep biological structures as they existed at one time; at that point the probabilities are altered, and the condition erased in your present — but also in your past.

(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.

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.

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.)

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.

(A one-minute pause at 11:21.) Learned behavior therefore alters not only present and future but also past conduct. Your power as a rational consciousness focused in the present provides you with opportunities for creativity that you are but vaguely learning to understand. As you do learn, you will automatically begin to appreciate the multidimensional nature of not only your own species but of others as well. The moment as you think of it, then, is the creative framework through which you, the nonphysical self, constantly form corporeal reality; and through that window into earthly existence you form both its future and its past.