“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In greater terms, the past is definitely created from the present. In your system of reality this does not seem to be the case at all, since your senses project a forward kind of motion outward upon events. “Subatomic particles,” however, appear in your present, rippling into your system’s dimensions, creating their own “tracks,” which scientists then try to observe. In some cases, unknowingly, your scientists are close to observing the birth of time effects within your system. (Pause.) Since your brains are composed of cells with their atoms and molecules, and since these are themselves made of certain invisible particles,² then your memories are already structured by the biological mechanisms that make them possible in your terms. (In parentheses: After death, for example, you still possess a memory, though it does not operate through the physical organism as you understand it.)

Give us a moment … Physicists know that waves can appear as particles upon certain conditions, and that particles can behave like waves.³ So moments as you understand them are like waves experienced as “particles” — as small bubbles, for example, each one breaking and another forming. Subatomic particles also behave like waves sometimes; in fact, it is usually only when they act like particles that they are perceived at all.

(9:42.) Physicists think of atoms as particles. Their wavelike characteristics are not observed. At other levels of reality, atoms behave in a wavelike manner … Give us a moment … Subjectively, you will think of your own thoughts as waves rather than as particles. Yet in the dream level of reality those waves “break” into particles, so to speak. They form pseudo-objects from your viewpoint. While dreaming you accept that reality as real. Only upon awakening do the dream objects seem not-real, or imaginary. The nervous system itself is biologically equipped to perceive various gradations of physical matter, and there are “in-between” impulse passageways that are utilized while dreaming. From your point of view these are alternate passageways, but in the dream state they allow you to perceive as physical matter objects that in the waking state would not be observable.

Give us a moment … The dream world is as organized as your own, but from the waking state you do not focus upon that inner organization. Your dream images exist. They are quite as real as a table or a chair. They are built up from particles, invisible only from the waking situation.

In your physical universe such particles are invisible components, deduced but never directly encountered. To a certain extent they are latent. In some other realities, however, their characteristics rule rather than the attributes of the visible particles that you see. Dream images, therefore, exist at a different range of matter.

Now: Many of these invisible particles (CU’s) can be in more than one place at a time — a fact that quite confounds the physically tuned brain perceiving a world in which objects stay where they are supposed to be.

(Pause.) Basically, however, each “appearance” of such a particle is a self-version, for it is altered to some extent by its “location.” Period. So can the human self appear in several places at once,⁵ each such appearance subtly altering the “human” particle, so that each appearance is a version of an “original” self that as itself never appears in those terms.⁶ When you look at an electron — figuratively speaking — you are observing a trace or a track of something else entirely, and that appearance is termed an electron. So the self that you know is a physical trace or intrusion into space and time of an “original” self that never appears. In a way, then, you are as ghostly as an electron.

The unknown self, the “original self,” straddles realities, dipping in and out of them in creative versions of itself, taking on the properties of the system in which it appears, and the characteristics native to that environment. Waves and particles are versions of other kinds of behavior taken by energy. Using that analogy, you flow in wavelike fashion into the physical particleized versions that you call corporal existences.

Give us a moment … I am putting this as simply as possible; but when your “original self” enters [part of] itself into three-dimensional life from an inner reality, the energy waves carrying it break — not simply into one particle, following our analogy, but into a number of conscious particles. In certain terms these are built up using the medium at hand — the biological properties of the earth. They spread out from the “point of contact,” forming individual lives. In your conception of the centuries, then, there are other counterparts of yourself living at the same time and in different places — all creative versions of the original self. There is a great intimate cooperation that exists biologically and spiritually between all of the beings on your planet “at any given time.” You are all connected psychically in terms of inner and outer structures. A certain identity and cohesiveness is also maintained because of these inner connections.

(10:51.) There are psychic structures quite as effective as physical ones, and these underlie the reality of your objective world. They merge together beautifully to form an inner picture of the world at any given “time,” even while that picture is ever-changing. In greater terms, the picture of your world at any given time can be compared to the position, behavior, and characteristics of an invisible particle as it is “caught” intruding into your reality.

Again, your idea of personhood limits you when you think of these concepts. You imagine personhood to be a kind of mental particle that must have definite boundaries, or it will lose its identity. The identity of even the smallest consciousness is always maintained — but not limited. If you can think of your present idea of identity as if it were but one shape or one motion of a moving particle, a shape or a motion that never loses its imprint or meaning, then you could also see how you could follow it forward or backward to the shape or motion taken “before or afterward.”

3. A number of subjects related to Seth’s discussion of waves and particles can be found in the following sources (some of which contain their own references) in Appendix 18: the quotations from the 755th session (Seth: “My own psychological reality is not particleized”), and notes 24 and 35. Then see Note 9 for Appendix 19.

4. I doubt if by his statement Seth means that physicists are attempting to study his CU’s (see Note 2) — certainly not yet, although a few scientists who have written us thereby show that they’re familiar with Seth’s thinking here. Rather, some “modern” physicists are searching for nonmaterial “particles” that certain theories (one of them having to do with “quarks,” for example) say should exist if the theories are valid. Such pseudoparticles, then, are mathematical entities that can affect the actions of physical objects.

5. In Volume 1, see Seth’s first delivery for the 681st session: “I told you once that there were pulses of activity in which you blinked off and on — this applying even to atomic and subatomic particles.” The full session should be reviewed, especially those parts dealing with the “great inner unpredictability of any molecule, atom, or wave….” Also see notes 1 and 2.