“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Think of the present as a pool of experience drawn from many sources, fed, in your terms, by tributaries from both the past and the future. There are an infinite number of such tributaries (probabilities), and through your beliefs you choose from these, adjusting their currents. For example: If you constantly focus on the belief that your early background was damaging and negative, then only such experiences will flow into your present life from the past. It does no good to say, “But my life was traumatic,” therefore reinforcing the belief. You must in one way or another modify that conviction, or preferably change it entirely — or you will never escape from its effects. This does not mean “lying” to yourself; but if it seems to you that your background held no joys, accomplishments or pleasures, then you are lying to yourself now. You have concentrated upon the negative to such a degree that anything else seems invisible. (See the 644th session in Chapter Eleven.) From the present you have hypnotized yourself, viewing the past not as it was to your experience, but as it appears now in the light of your current beliefs.

No negative beliefs were thrust upon you, therefore, despite your will. Period. None can be inflicted upon you that you do not consciously accept. In formal hypnosis, the hypnotist and the subject play a game. If the hypnotist orders the subject to forget what happened, that individual will pretend to do so. In that context both hold the belief in the resulting forgetfulness, and it is the power of belief that is being demonstrated. But instead this is taken as an indication that the conscious mind is helpless under such conditions, generally speaking, and this is not the case.

(Pause at 10:42.) We are going to deal with practical methods that will allow you to alter beliefs and change your experience. Later in the book we’ll show how your individual beliefs attract you to joys or disasters. We will also discuss the ways in which mass beliefs will bring many of you together both in great periods of celebration, or as victims or survivors of disasters that seem to exist apart from yourselves.

My heartiest regards to both of you.