“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In other words I am telling you that your present beliefs, in a manner of speaking, are like the directions given to the entire personality, simultaneously organizing and reorganizing past experience according to your current concepts of reality.

The future — the probable future — is being altered in the same way, of course. To look backward for the source of current problems can lead you into the habit of seeking only negative episodes from your past, and prevent you from experiencing it as a source of pleasure, accomplishment, or success (very intently).

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.

Those memories will be used to reach any conclusion, as statistics can be used, for example. Along the way you may settle for a given remembered event or two, and assign to them the reasons for your present behavior. If so, you are already prepared to change your current beliefs and mode of action, and simply use the occurrences or habits of the past as a stimulus or motivation. (See the 616th session in Chapter Two.)

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.

(10:45.) It is for this reason that “past-life information” is so often used to reinforce current personal social situations — because, like the past in this life, such memories are constructed through present belief.

In a way that will be explained in another book for those interested in such matters, there is a kind of coincidence with all of these present points of power that exist between you and your “reincarnational” selves. There are even biological connections in terms of cellular “memory.” (See the 653rd session in Chapter Thirteen.) So through your current beliefs you can, in your own space and time, attract tendencies toward certain experiences shared by these others. There is a constant interaction in this multidimensional point of power, therefore, so that in your terms one incarnated self draws from all of the others what abilities it wants, according to its own specific, localized beliefs.