“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(During recent nights Jane has been aware of receiving book material from Seth, and of dictating it to me. “I’ll wake up confused,” she said. “It’s usually advanced stuff that we haven’t come to yet, and I’ll say, ‘Hey, what’s happening?’ Sometimes it’s just information for me — but anyhow, I know dictation’s been going on and that you’ve been taking notes. Then I’ll realize that can’t be, because we’re still in bed….” She’s had experiences like this before. See the notes following the 619th session in Chapter Four, for example.)

I have frequently said that beliefs cause reality, and that no symptom will simply fade away unless the “reason” is ascertained — but such reasons go far beneath your current ideas of cause and effect. They involve intimate philosophical value judgments on the part of each individual. Beneath them, the apparent causes of limitations in personal life, there are other far-reaching beliefs, and each individual will use those elements in his private experience to back these up. This applies to any kind of lack or hindrance severe enough to be a problem.

You have been taught that you are at the mercy of previous events, so your idea of looking for the source of personal difficulty is to examine the past, but — to find what you did wrong there, or what mistakes occurred there, or what inadequate interpretations were made there! Again, regardless of what you have been taught, the point of power is in the present; and again, your present beliefs will be used to structure your recollections.

At one point or another the individual ceased concentrating upon what was right in certain personal areas, and began to focus upon and magnify specific “lacks.” With all good intentions, then, various solutions are looked for, but all based upon the premise that something is wrong.

You must look within yourself for evidences of what you want in terms of positive experience. Examine your past with that in mind. Imagine your future from the power point of the present. In such a way at least you are not using the past to reinforce your limitations, or projecting them into the future. It is only natural to contrast what you want with what you have, and it is very easy to become discouraged in so doing, but looking for errors in the past will not help you. A correctly utilized five-minute period of time can be of great benefit, however. In this period concentrate upon the fact that the point of power is now. Feel and dwell upon the certainty that your emotional, spiritual and psychic abilities are focused through the flesh, and for five minutes only direct all of your attention toward what you want. Use visualization or verbal thought — whatever comes most naturally to you; but for that period do not concentrate upon any lacks, just upon your desire.

(10:30.) Use all of your energy and attention. Then forget about it. Do not check to see how well it is working. Simply make sure that in that period your intentions are clear. Then in one way or another, according to your own individual situation, make one physical gesture or act that is in line with your belief or desire. Behave physically, then, at least once a day in a way that shows that you have faith in what you are doing. The act can be a very simple one. If you are lonely and feel unwanted, it can merely involve your smiling at someone else. If you are poor, it can involve such a simple thing as buying an item you want that costs two cents more than the one you would usually buy — acting on the faith, even that feebly, that the two cents will somehow be given you or come into your experience; but acting as if you had more than you do.

In health terms, it involves conducting yourself once a day as though you were not sick in whatever way given you. But the belief in the present, reinforced for five minutes, plus such a physical action, will sometimes bring literally awesome results.

Those of you who believe in reincarnation in more or less conventional terms, can make the error of using or blaming “past” lives, organizing them through your current beliefs. It is bad enough to believe that you are at the mercy of one past, but to consider yourself helpless before innumerable previous errors from other lives puts you in an impossible situation; the conscious will is robbed of its power to act. Such lives exist simultaneously. They are other expressions of yourself, interacting, but with each conscious self possessing the point of power in its own present.

(“Hmmm,” she added, “I just remembered Seth gave material something like this in [ESP] class last night….” I’d forgotten too; Jane had talked about it while I helped her straighten up the living room at about 1:15 a.m. But we won’t see a transcript of the class tapes until next Tuesday night.

(Pause.) These selves are different counterparts of yourself in creaturehood, experiencing bodily reality; but at the same time your organism itself shuts out the simultaneous nature of experience. This does not mean that at other levels you cannot perceive it, but that generally speaking events must seem to appear in a series.