“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The past exists as a series of electromagnetic connections, held in the physical brain on the one hand, but it also consists of the same sort of realities retained in the nonphysical mind. These electromagnetic connections can be changed. The present exists as a series of electromagnetic connections in both the brain and the mind, and this is the only reality which you are justified in giving to your present.

The past is no more objective, no more independent from the perceiver, than is the present. These electromagnetic connections which compose the past were largely made by the individual perceiver, and the perceiver of course is always a participator.

There is of course a composite past that is composed of such individual electromagnetic connections, and this composite past is not the same past that once existed, in those terms. The past itself is being continually recreated by every individual, as attitudes and associations change. This is an actual recreation, and not a symbolic one. The child is indeed still within the man, but he is not the child that once was, in those terms. For even the child within the man continually changes, and again I am not speaking of symbolic change.

Now. Difficulties are caused when such changes in the past do not occur automatically. Such difficulties as severe neurosis are often caused precisely because the individual has not automatically changed his past. Once more, the only reality that can be assigned to the past is that granted to the symbols and associations and memory images that exist electromagnetically both within the physical brain and within the mind.

But this is the only reality that can be granted to the present. I am speaking now in your terms only, and this point should be clearly understood, for I am simplifying conditions considerably. A change of attitude, a new association, any of innumerable other actions, will automatically set up new electromagnetic connections, and break others. Now part of this we shall explain later, for these changes obviously affect both the future and the past. But the past, again, is continually changed by you, and by every individual. For basically you see, it is not something done and finished with, as is supposed.

And you are more free than you imagine to completely alter many aspects of your own past. If you say that the future is dependent upon the past, therefore, you must also say that the past is dependent upon the future. Once more, the past was never an independent, concrete object existing apart from the perceiving participator; for he made his past, and its only reality exists in the electromagnetic connections within his own organic and psychic structure.