The reasons given for such subjugations matter little in the long run, for the reasons change with the times and with your culture. You are not under a sentence placed upon you for original sin, by any childhood events, or by past-life experience. Your life, for example, may be far less fulfilling than you think you would prefer. You may be less when you would be more, but you are not under a pall placed upon your psyche, either by original sin, Freud’s infancy syndromes, or past-life influences. I will try to explain the past-life influences a bit more clearly here. They affect you as any experience does. Time is not closed, however — it is open. One life is not buried in the past, disconnected from the present self and any future self as well.

HOW THOUGHTS FORM MATTER —
COORDINATION POINTS

The familiarity of speech begins to vanish when you realize that you, yourself, when you begin a sentence do not know precisely how you will end it, or even how you form the words. You do not consciously know how you manipulate a staggering pyramid of symbols, picking from them precisely those you need to express a given thought. For that matter, you do not know how you think.

It is only from this viewpoint that the true nature of physical matter can be understood. It is only by comprehending the nature of this constant translation of thoughts and desires — not into words now, but into physical objects — that you can realize your true independence from circumstance, time, and environment.

(Jane had a lot of images while Seth was speaking. He had the idea for this chapter very clearly in mind, she said; and, with extraordinary vividness, he was “impressing” her with his idea of matter being used as a means of communication. Yet she couldn’t describe the images she had seen.