“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

Now: You must understand that your present is the point at which flesh and matter meet with the spirit. Therefore the present is your point of power in your current lifetime, as you think of it. If you assign greater force to the past, then you will feel ineffective and deny yourself your own energy.

For an exercise, sit with your eyes wide open, looking about you, and realize that this moment represents the point of your power, through which you can affect both past and future events.

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.

To pretend to ignore your age, to act young because you fear your age, is no answer. (See the 644th session in Chapter Eleven.) In your terms your point of reality and power is, once more, in your current experience. A realization of this would allow you at any age to draw upon qualities and knowledge that “existed” in your past or “will exist” in your future. Your ages are probable [simultaneous].

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.