“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.

On all other-than-normally conscious levels, however, you deal very effectively with probabilities. The cells maintain their integrity by choosing one probability above the others. The present hub of the wheel, therefore, is but one prominent present, operationally valid. Cause and effect as you think of them appear only because of the motion, the relative motion, of the wheel in our analogy.

When your eyes are on the road of time, therefore, you forget the circular motion of your being. When you dream or sleep, however, the world of cause and effect either vanishes or appears confused and chaotic. Normal daytime images are mixed and matched, so that combinations are formed quite different from those seen in the daylight. The known rules that govern the behavior of creatures and objects in dreams seem no longer to apply. Past, present, and future merge in a seemingly bizarre alliance in which, were you waking, you would lose all mental footing. The circular nature of the psyche to some extent makes itself known. When you think of dreams you usually consider those aspects of it only, commenting perhaps upon the strange activities, the odd juxtapositions and the strange character of dream life itself. Few are struck by the fact of their dreams’ own order, or impressed by the ultimate restraint that allows such sometimes-spectacular events to occur in such a relatively restricted physical framework.

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.

On cellular levels the body has a picture not only of its own present condition, but of all those aspects of the physical environment that affect its own condition. In its own codified fashion it is not only aware of local weather conditions, for example, but of all those world patterns of weather upon which the local area is dependent. It then prepares itself ahead of time to meet whatever challenges of adjustment will be necessary. It weighs probabilities; it reacts to pressures of various kinds.