“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.

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.

As mentioned in this book (in Chapter Four, for instance), the emerging memories will then turn on the body mechanisms, merging past and present in some kind of harmonious picture. This means that the pieces will fit together whether they are joyful or not.

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.

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.

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.

Which you? Which world? If you are lonely it is because you believe in your loneliness in this present point that you acknowledge as time. From what seems to be the past you draw only those memories that reinforce your condition, and you project those into the future. Physically, you are overwhelming your body as it responds to a state of loneliness through chemical and hormonal reactions. You are also denying your own point of action within the present.

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.