“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Yet the units of consciousness, being independent of space and time, form your cellular structure, and that structure deals in a most basic manner with the nature of probabilities. Although the body appears permanent and in existence from one moment to the next, basically it constantly rises out of the bed of probabilities, hovering at your now-point of perception and experience, and its apparent stability is dependent upon the knowledge of “future” probabilities as well as “past” ones.

(Slower at 10:07:) Your body’s condition at any time is not so much the result of its own comprehension of its “past history” as it is the result of its own comprehension of future probabilities. The cells precognate. This is being simplified for now. I will make it clearer later in the book.² But your limited ideas of time cause conceptual barriers that operate even when you consider the structure of physical biological life.

For example: It is truer to say that heredity operates from the future backward into the past, than it is to say that it operates from the past into the present. Neither statement would be precisely correct in any case, because your present is a poised balance affected as much by the probable future as the probable past.

It is impossible for you to examine an atom, a cell, or anything else except in your now. Period. Because your sense experience follows a time pattern that you can understand, then you take it for granted that a cell, for example, is the result of its past, and that its present condition arises from the past.⁴ The fetus grows into an adult, not because it is programmed from the past, but because it is to some extent precognitively aware of its probabilities, and from the “future” then imprints this information into the past structure.

From your viewpoint, however, an examination of a cell will not show you that, but only its present condition. It should appear obvious from what I am saying that neither future nor past is predetermined. From your platform of poised now-experience, you alter both the past and the future, and that alteration, that change, that action, causes your point of immediate sense life.⁵

(A one-minute pause at 11:22.) Such behavior even causes a certain corporal dishonesty, for the cells’ freedom from time means that on certain levels the cellular structure is aware of probable future events, as mentioned (just before break). The body, therefore, is reacting to future and past activity as well, in order to maintain its present corporal balance.

4. In earlier days, Jane and I only thought of the cell as a result of its past, too. Yet at the same time, Jane in her poetry was trying to see through that pervasive belief. The few lines below are from Pathetique, a long poem she wrote in 1959. She was 30 years old, and her development of the Seth material lay five years in the future.