“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Though you may not realize it, you really manage your subjective lives in a rather circular fashion. Pretend that the present moment is like a wheel, with your concentration at the hub. To maintain what you think of as time momentum, the hub is connected by spokes to the exterior circular framework. Otherwise the hub alone would get you nowhere, and your “moment” would not even give you a bumpy ride.

The forward motion brings you into the future, out of the past from which it seems you are emerging. So you plot a straight course, it seems, through time, never realizing in our analogy that the wheel’s circular motion allows you to transverse this ongoing road. The hub of the present, therefore, is held together by “spokes.” These have nothing to do with your ideas of cause and effect at all. Instead they refer to the circular motion of your own psyche as it seems to progress in time. Each present moment of your experience is dependent upon the future as well as the past, your death as well as your birth. Your birth and your death are built in, so to speak, together, one implied in the other.

You could not die unless you were the kind of creature who was born, nor could you have a present moment as you consider it. Your body is aware of the fact of its death at birth, and of its birth at its death, for all of its possibilities for action take place in the area between. Death is therefore as creative as birth, and as necessary for action and consciousness, in your terms.

For example, in a dream of 20 minutes, events that would ordinarily take years can be experienced. The body ages its 20 minutes of time, and that is all. In dreams, experience is peripheral, in that it dips into your time and touches it, leaving ripples; but the dream events themselves exist largely out of time. Dream experience is ordered in a circular fashion. Sometimes it never touches the hub of your present moment at all, as you think of it, as far as your memory is concerned; yet the dream is, and it is registered at all other levels of your existence, including the cellular.