“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As far as I can see, Seth’s reference to hypnosis had to do with the “training” undergone by some mediums in which hypnosis is used to initiate and stabilize the trance state, and occasionally to call forth the communications of “control” personalities. This didn’t happen in my case. The whole thing was spontaneous. Although I know how to use self-hypnosis now, having studied it in the past several years, I’ve never used it for a session.

“The past exists as a series of electromagnetic connections held in the physical brain and in the nonphysical mind. These electromagnetic connections can be changed. …

“In other words, the past and present are real to the same extent. On occasion the past can become more ‘real’ than the present, and in such cases past actions are reacted to in what you call the present. You take it for granted that present action can change the future, but present actions can also change the past.

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

“The connections, therefore, can be changed, and such changes are far from uncommon. They happen spontaneously on a subconscious basis. The past is seldom what you remember it to be, for you have already rearranged it from the instant of any given event. The past is being constantly re-created by each individual as attitudes and associations change. This is an actual re-creation, not a symbolic one. The child is indeed still within the man, but he is not the child that ‘was.’ For even the child within the man constantly changes.

“Difficulties arise, in fact, when such alterations do not occur automatically. Severe neurosis is often caused precisely because the individual has not changed his past. Once more, the only reality that can be assigned to the past is that granted to the symbols and associations and images that exist electromagnetically within the physical brain and nonphysical mind.

“Every action changes every other action—we go back to our ABC’s. Therefore, every action in your present affects those actions you call past. Ripples from a thrown stone go out in all directions, and I am going out rather far on the limb myself right here. Remembering what you know of the nature of time, you realize that the apparent boundaries between past, present, and future are only illusions caused by the amount of action you can physically perceive.

“Therefore, it is possible to react in the past to an event that has not yet occurred, to be influenced by your own future. It is also possible for an individual to react in the past to an event in the future which may never occur in your terms.

“Now this couple represented a sort of time-projection, for literally you could have become what they were. This existed in that present as a probability. You perceived that portion of the probable future and reacted to it, and the possible transformation of yourselves into those images did not occur. Because past, present, and future exist simultaneously, there is no reason why you cannot react to an event whether or not it happens to fall within the small field of reality in which you usually observe and participate.

“In summation: the individual is hardly at the mercy of past events, for he changes them constantly. He is hardly at the mercy of future events, for he changes these not only before but after their happening.

“Again: the past is as real as the future, no more or no less. For the past exists only as a pattern of electromagnetic currents within the mind and brain, and these constantly change. … An individual’s future actions are not dependent upon a concrete finished past, for such a past never existed.”