“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause, and slowly:) The cells’ basic innocence of time discrimination had to be bypassed. At deeply unconscious levels the neurological structure is more highly adaptable than it appears. Adjustments were made, therefore. Basically, the neurological structure responds to both past and future data. Biologically, then, such activity is built-in. The specialized “new” kind of consciousness in one body had to respond pinpoint fast. Therefore it focused upon only one series of neurological messages.

The past, in the present, would appear so brilliantly that man could not react adequately in circumstances of time that he had himself created. The future was blocked, practically speaking (long pause), to preserve freedom of action and to encourage physical exploration, curiosity, and creativity. With memory, however, mental projections into the future were of course also possible so that man could plan his activities in time, and foresee probable results: “Ghost images” of the future probabilities always acted as mental stimuli for physical explorations in all areas, and of all kinds.

(Pause at 10:37.) Its focus in the present is now secure. That focus finally brought about, in your terms, an expansion of consciousness, and one that early man did not have to handle. In your terms, time now includes more space, and hence more experience and stimuli. Again speaking historically, in the past the private person in any given hour was aware at once only of those events happening in his immediate environment. He could respond instantly. Events were, to that extent now, manageable. And rest your hand if you want to.

(Slowly:) In a world in which individuals were confined in space in a tribe or clan (a one-minute pause), action was immediate. The environment presented a framework in which consciousness learned to deal with stimuli in a direct fashion. It learned how to focus. The necessary specialization meant that only so much data could be handled at once, emotionally or otherwise. The formation of different tribes allowed man to behave cooperatively, in small numbers. This meant that those on the outside were selectively ignored, considered strangers.

(A one-minute pause at 11:20.) While you were so concerned with protecting what you thought of as the boundaries and integrity of one selfhood, as a race you actually arrived at a point where you were beginning to deny your own greater reality. But all of this is part of the experiment upon which the race embarked in your probability.

The child was himself in the past on the one hand, and yet he was a probable future self in that past. (Pause.) From the standpoint of Ruburt’s official mental focus, and from the standpoint of the neurologically accepted present, that past environment had to remain off-center, or blurred. He could experience it only by sidestepping officially accepted neurological activity. He visited a store that is not at that location “anymore,” and here the sense data were somewhat clearer. He had no conscious memories of the store’s interior, yet it was instantly apparent to him — the dark oiled floor, spread with sawdust. Even the odors were present.

The infant with whom he momentarily identified as the self he is now only opaquely and indirectly shared common experience. This was not simple regression, then. That child grew up in that probability, and Ruburt grew up in this one. (Pause.) He touched upon certain coordinates that were neurologically shared, however, by both: He and the child were familiar with the carriage and the curb, the mother who pushed the carriage, and the house into which Ruburt felt himself, as the child, being carried.

(Pause.) Skip several spaces.