“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.

The abilities, strengths and variants that you may want to actualize are already latent, in your terms, and at your disposal. Suppose that you are unhealthy and desire health. If you understand the nature of probabilities, you will not need to pretend to ignore your present situation. You will recognize it instead as a probable reality that you have physically materialized. Taking that for granted, you will then begin the process necessary to bring a different probability into physical experience.

(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.

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.

Your present beliefs govern the actualization of events. Creativity and experience are being formed moment by moment by each individual. Period, and break.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.