“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

One moment I sat at my desk with my paper and pen beside me. The next instant, my consciousness rushed out of my body, yet it was itself bodiless, taking up no space at all; it seemed to be merging with the air outside the window, plunging through the treetops, resting, curled within a single leaf. Exultation and comprehension, new ideas, sensations, novel groupings of images and words rushed through me so quickly there was no time to call out. There was no present, past or future: I knew this, suddenly, irrevocably.

The past is the memory of ideas that were but are no longer physical constructions.

Memory is the ghost image of “past” idea constructions.

At no point can we actually say that one construction vanishes and another takes its place, but artificially we adopt certain points as past, present and future, for convenience. At some point, we agree that the physical construction ceases to be one thing and becomes another, but, actually, it still contains elements of the “past” construction and is already becoming the “next” one.

More complicated organisms — mammals, for example — have need of further mechanisms to construct ideas because they are able to perceive more of them. Here memory is an element. Now the organism has a built-in ghost image of past constructions by which to perfect and test new ones. Reflection of some sort enters into the picture, and with it the organism is given more to do. Slowly, within its range of receptivity, it is given some choice in the actual construction of ideas into physical reality.

The reflection is brief, but for a moment the animal partakes of a new dimension. The shadow of time glimmers in his eyes as the still imperfected memory of past constructions lingers in his consciousness. As yet, memory storage is small, but now the instantaneous construction is no longer instantaneous, in our terms. There is a pause: the organism — dog or tiger — can choose to attack or not to attack. The amoeba must construct its small world without reflection and without time as we know it.