“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

(Long pause.) The same sort of thing operates in the actualization of any event in which you are involved. You create your life, then. Inner images are of great importance to the artist. He tries to project them upon his canvas or board. Again, you are each your own artist, and your inner visualizations become models for other situations and events. The artist utilizes training and mixes his colors in order to give artistic flesh to his painting. The images in your mind draw to themselves all the proper emotional energy and power needed to fill them out as physical events.

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.

The present seen before you, with its intimate physical experience, is the result of action in other such presents. Do not be intimidated therefore by the past or the future. There is no need at all for undesirable aspects of your contemporary reality to be projected into the future, unless you use the power of the present to do so.

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.

If you were sixty, you would be able to use the physical strength you imagined was denied you now, but available then. All of this would be physically and biologically expressed within your body as well.

(11:37. Seth rather suddenly launched into a page of data for me. It was about some limiting attitudes I had concerning painting and age; it was very perceptive, and I was somewhat surprised to realize that the ideas had been right there before me all along. The session ended at 11:45 p.m.