“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

In each case, however, the point of power is the present, and from that moment you choose which you, and which world. The experience of a country is the cumulative result of the choice of each individual in it, so as you choose your own circumstances you affect each other person within your country and your world.

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].

You do not understand the communications between your selves and pets, for example, where in their own way they interpret and react to your beliefs.¹ They mirror your ideas, then, and so become vulnerable as they would not be in their natural circumstances. In greater terms their relationship with you is natural, of course, but their innate realization that the creature’s point of power is in the present is to some degree undermined by their own receptivity and translation of your beliefs. A young kitten is treated differently than an older one. The cat responds to such conditioning. In the same way your own conclusions about age become fact in your experience. In line with them, if you could convince yourself that you were ten years younger, or ten years older, then it would be faithfully reflected in your personal environment.

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.

(Jane was much taken with the phrase, “point of power.” She found it very evocative. After the session she remarked several times that she wished Seth had used it in the heading for this chapter. She even discussed adding it to the heading, without really intending to do so…. )