“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This operates in individual and mass terms. Suppose that today your home was robbed. Yesterday, the theft was one of innumerable probable events. I chose such an example because more than one person would have to be involved — the victim and the robber. (Pause.) Why was your home ransacked, and not your neighbor’s? In one way or another, through your conscious thought you attracted such an event, and drew it from probability into actuality. The occurrence would be an accumulation of energy — turned into action — and be brought about by corollary beliefs.

You may be convinced that human nature is evil, or that no one is safe from another’s aggression, or that people are motivated mainly by greed. Such beliefs attract their own reality. If you have anything worth losing, you are then automatically convinced that someone else will take it from you, or try their hardest to do so. In your own way you send out messages to just such a person. On basic levels your convictions will be quite similar, but one will see himself as the victim and one as the aggressor — that is, each of you will react differently to the same set of beliefs. However the two of you are necessary if a crime of that nature is, or is to be, committed.

(9:25.) The beliefs of both of you find justification in physical life, and only reinforce themselves. The fear of robbers attracts robbers. If you think that men are evil, however, you are often not able to examine that as a belief, but take it as a condition of reality.

All of your present experience was drawn from probable reality. During your life, any event must come through your creaturehood, with the built-in time recognition that is so largely a part of your neurological structure; so usually there is a lag, a lapse in time, during which your beliefs cause material actualization. When you try to change your convictions in order to change your experience, you also have to first stop the momentum that you have already built up, so to speak. You are changing the messages while the body is used to reacting smoothly, unquestioningly, to a certain set of beliefs.

There is a steady even flow in which conscious activity through the neurological structure brings about events, and a familiar pattern of reaction is established. When you alter these conscious beliefs through effort, then a period of time is necessary while the structure learns to adjust to the new preferred situation. If beliefs are changed overnight, comparatively less time is required.

In a manner of speaking, each belief can be seen as a powerful station, pulling to it from fields of probabilities only those signals to which it is attuned, and blocking out all others. When you set up a new station there may be some static or bleed-through from an old one for a while.

Now: An artist produces a body of work in his lifetime. Each painting is but one materialization, one focused presentation, of an endless variety of probable paintings. The actual work involved in the selection of data is still made according to the beliefs in the artist’s conscious mind as to who he is, how good an artist he is, what kind of artist he is, what “school” of artistic beliefs he subscribes to, his ideas of society and his place in it, and esthetic and economic values, to name but a few.

You can change the picture of your life at any time if only you realize that it is simply the one portrait of yourself that you have created from an unlimited amount of probable ones. The peculiar aspect of your own probable portraits will still be characteristic of you, and no other.

(10:19.) You will do this by concentrating upon what you want, but feeling no conflict between that and what you have, because one will not contradict the other; each will be seen as a reflection of belief in daily life. As it took some time to build up your present image with its unhealthy aspects, so it may take time to change that picture. But concentration upon the present unhealthy situation will only prolong it. Period.

Each condition is as real or unreal as the other. Which you? Which world? You have your choice, broadly, within certain frameworks that you have chosen as a part of your creaturehood. The past as you think of it, and the subconscious, again as you think of it, have little to do with your present experience outside of your beliefs about them. The past contains for each of you some moments of joy, strength, creativity and splendor, as well as episodes of unhappiness, despair perhaps, turmoil and cruelty. Your present convictions will act like a magnet, activating all such past issues, happy or sad. You will choose from your previous experience all of those events that reinforce your conscious beliefs, and so ignore those that do not; the latter may even seem to be nonexistent.

This joining of the past and present, in that context, predisposes you to similar future events, for you have geared yourself for them. Change now quite practically alters both the past and the future. For you, because of your neurological organization, the present is obviously the only point from which past and future can be changed, or when action becomes effected.

I am not speaking symbolically. In the most intimate of terms, your past and future are modified by your present reactions. Alterations occur within the body. Circuits within the nervous system are changed, and energies that you do not understand seek out new connections on much deeper levels far beyond consciousness.

Your present beliefs govern the actualization of events. Creativity and experience are being formed moment by moment by each individual. Period, and break.

Exterior conditions can always be changed if you understand the principles of which I am speaking. Diseases can be eliminated, even those that seem fatal — but only if the beliefs behind them are erased or altered enough so that their specific focusing effect upon the body is sufficiently released. The present as you think of it, and in practical working terms, is that point at which you select your physical experience from all those events that could be materialized. Your physical circumstances change automatically as your beliefs do. As your knowledge grows, so your experience becomes more fulfilling. This does not necessarily mean that it evens out in any way, or that there are not peaks and valleys. Each aspiration presupposes the admission of a lack, each challenge presupposes a barrier to be overcome. The more adventurous will often choose greater challenges, and so in their minds the contrasts between what they want to achieve and their present status can seem to be impossible.

(Pause at 11:15.) In many “native” cultures an individual is not considered in terms of his age at all, and the numbering of years is regarded as insignificant. In fact, a man may not know his age as you think of it. It would do you all good — young, middle-aged and old alike — to forget the number of your years, because in your culture so many beliefs are limiting in those ways. Youth is denied its wisdom and old age is denied its joy.

Although time does not basically exist as you “know” it, you are neurologically forced to perceive your life as a series of passing moments. As creatures you are born young and grow older. Yet the animals, as creatures, are not as limited in their experience in that regard. They have no beliefs in old age that automatically shut down their abilities; so left alone, while they do physically die as all creatures must in those terms, they do not deteriorate in the same way.

You do not understand the communications between your selves and pets, for example, where in their own way they interpret and react to your beliefs.¹ They mirror your ideas, then, and so become vulnerable as they would not be in their natural circumstances. In greater terms their relationship with you is natural, of course, but their innate realization that the creature’s point of power is in the present is to some degree undermined by their own receptivity and translation of your beliefs. A young kitten is treated differently than an older one. The cat responds to such conditioning. In the same way your own conclusions about age become fact in your experience. In line with them, if you could convince yourself that you were ten years younger, or ten years older, then it would be faithfully reflected in your personal environment.

Vitamins, better food, medical attention, may temporarily rejuvenate the body, but unless you change your beliefs it will quickly become swamped again by your feelings of depression. In such a case you must realize that you make your own loneliness, and resolve to change through both thought and action. Action is thought in physical motion, outwardly perceived.