“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.