“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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.

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.

If you learn to get hold of this feeling of power now, you can use it most effectively to alter your life situation in whatever way you choose — again, within those limitations set by your creaturehood. If you were born without a limb, for example, your power in the present cannot automatically regenerate it in this life, although in other systems of reality you do possess that limb. (See Seth’s Preface, as well as the 615th session in Chapter Two.)

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.