“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You have to handle and assimilate information now available as to happenings in other places that, in previous centuries, no ordinary individual would have been aware of. Events in distant places then become present knowledge. Time intervals between an episode and your knowledge of it are shortened, though the event may occur on the other side of the world.

(12:02.) In a very limited and fumbling manner this is hinted at through the use of computers, where you try to assess “future probabilities” and act accordingly in your present. The mind can do this far better than any computer. If it believed this, then certain portions of the brain would be activated. The brain would become aware of more of the mind’s knowledge, and the probabilities of future events would be made consciously available.

Now the brain would have to sort out this information so that the physically attuned mechanism was clearly able to maintain its temporal present. When man first developed the pause of reflection, as mentioned earlier in this book (see sessions 635–36 in Chapter Nine), he did undergo initial disorientation before he learned to distinguish a vividly remembered event of the past from a presently experienced one. The growing consciousness had to make such distinctions for practical behavior. To utilize future probable events, the physical brain would be forced to enlarge its function while keeping the individual in clear relationship with the present moment of power, or corporeal effectiveness. Affirmation always involves the acknowledgement of your power in the present. In greater terms, denial is the surrendering of that power. Affirmation then is the acquiescence to your ability, as a spirit within flesh, to form the physical reality of your creaturehood.

Now you can alter your present through altering your past, or you can change your present from the future. (See sessions 653–54 in Chapter Fourteen.) Even these manipulations must take place in your practical-experienced present, however. Many people have at one time or another changed their present behavior in response to the advice of a “future” probable self, without ever knowing they have done so.

Suppose you have a particular goal in mind as a youngster, toward which you work. Your intent, images, desires and determination form a psychic force that is projected out ahead of you, so to speak. You send the reality of yourself from your present into what you think of as the future.

Now: Say that at a certain stage you have some decisions to make and do not know which way to turn. You may sense that you are in danger of swerving from your purpose, yet for other reasons feel strongly inclined to do so. In a dream or in daydreaming, you may suddenly hear a voice, mentally, that tells you in no uncertain terms to go ahead with your initial intent. Or in some other way you may receive the same information — through an urge, or a vision, or simply by suddenly knowing what to do. This happens in your present.

(12:21.) In other terms, the self that you have projected into the future is sending you back encouragement from a probable reality that you still can create. That focused self operates from its present, however, and some day in your own future you may find yourself thinking nostalgically of a moment back in your own past, when you were indecisive and irresolute, but took the proper course.

You may think, “I am glad I did that,” or, “Knowing what I know now, how lucky I am that I made that decision.” And in that moment you are the future self that “once” spoke encouragingly to the person of the past. The probable future has caught up with the practical present.

New paragraph: The early affirmation of yourself projected into the future made such an incident possible. In the same way your acceptance of yourself and your own integrity can, at any moment in your present, alter your past and future.