“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In ordinary terms, I think that during our first month in the hill house we’ve been busy forming a fresh psychic atmosphere within which we can feel comfortable — and that anyone in a similar situation intuitively does the same thing. Perhaps not until a start is made in this way can any of us initiate certain functions in the “new” place. Actually, then, we seek to wed the old environment with the new, using the psyche as a bridge between the two worlds. Now when Jane and I drive past the old house we lived in on Water Street, close by downtown Elmira, we engender within ourselves mixed feelings of strangeness and familiarity. We see the intimately known windows of the two apartments we shared still vacant, the blinds hanging at careless angles. Friends have told us both places are being redecorated to a modest degree. “I’m glad they’re being changed,” Jane said the other day, in a strangely possessive response. “That means the world we had there can’t ever be entered by anyone else.”

Now, you move through probabilities in much the same way that you navigate in space. As you do not consciously bother with all of the calculations necessary in the process of walking down the street, so you also ignore the mechanisms that involve motion through probable realities. You manipulate through probabilities so smoothly, in fact, and with such finesse, that you seldom catch yourself in the act of changing your course from one probability to another.

Let us say that you are almost equally attracted to both courses. You teeter between probabilities, having the full power to choose one street or the other as physical experience. If you had to stand there and write down all the thoughts and associations connected with each course of action before you made your decision, you might never cross the intersection to begin with. You might be hit by an automobile as you stood there, lost in your musings.

Past associations merge with present reality and form a pattern. Mentally, a part of you actually starts out upon each street — a projected mental image. Period. As you stand there, then, in this case two such projected images go out onto streets Three and Four. To some extent these images experience “what will happen” if you yourself take one direction or the other. That information is returned to you instantaneously, and you make your decision accordingly. Say you choose Street Four. Physically you begin to walk in that direction. Street Four becomes your physical reality. You accept that experience in your prime sequence of events. You have, however, already sent out an energized mental image of yourself into Street Three, and you cannot withdraw that energy.

There is something highly important here concerning your technological civilization: As your world becomes more complicated, in those terms, you increase the number of probable actions practically available. The number of decisions multiplies. You can physically move from one place on the planet to another with relative ease. Centuries ago, ordinary people did not have the opportunity to travel from one country to another with such rapidity. As space becomes “smaller,” your probabilities grow in complexity. Your consciousness handles far more space data now. (In parentheses: I am speaking in your terms of time.) Watching television, you are aware of events that occur on the other side of the earth, so your consciousness necessarily becomes less parochial.⁸ As this has happened the whole matter (smiling) of probabilities has begun to assume a more practical cast. Civilizations are locked one into the other. Politicians try to predict what other governments will do. Ordinary people try to predict what their government might do.

More and more, you are beginning to deal with probabilities as you try to ascertain which of a number of probable events might physically occur. When the question of probabilities is a practical one, then scientists will give it more consideration.

The entire subject is very important, however. As far as a true psychology is concerned, individuals who are made aware of the existence of probable realities will no longer feel trapped by events. Your consciousness is at a point where it is beginning to understand the significance of “predictive action” — and predictive action always involves probabilities.

Whenever you try to predict behavior or events, then, you are dealing with probabilities.

However, it seems to you that all action in the past is fixed and done, while behavior in the future alone is open to change — so the word “prediction” assumes future action. Basically, the past is as open to change as the future is. When you are dealing with historic events you believe that no prediction is involved. Personally and as a species, you are convinced that there is a one-line series of finished events behind you.

In The Nature of Personal Reality I stated that the point of action occurs in the present.¹⁰ In Adventures in Consciousness Ruburt said, quite properly, that time experience actually splashed out from the present to form an apparent past and future.¹¹

When you seemingly look backward into time, and construct a history, you do so by projecting your own prime series of events into the past as it is understood. Obviously you read the past from the present, but you also create it from the present as well. You accept certain data — your present recognized series of events — then use that series as a measuring stick, so to speak: It automatically rejects what does not fit. At certain levels of experience this makes little difference. All data agree. No rough spots show.

It has been fashionable to think in terms of straight-line evolution, for example. As mentioned earlier in this book,¹³ the accepted theory of evolution is highly simplistic. Your species did not come from one particular source. You have many cousins, so to speak. Some traces of that lineage remain in your time. However, when you look “backward” at the planet you actually try to predict past behavior from the standpoint of the present.

Give us a moment … The species as you know it has within it, intrinsically, many abilities and characteristics that go unrecognized because you do not accept them as a part of your biological or spiritual heritage. Therefore they become latent and invisible, practically speaking. The same applies individually, when you deny yourselves the rich mixture of consciousness and experience that is available through a recognition of the manipulation of probable realities.

5. Five months ago, in the 721st session, I noted Jane’s speculations “that ‘Unknown’ Reality might prove to be so long that it could go into two volumes — a probable development I hardly took seriously.”

7. Seth gave two blocks of material in Seth Speaks that are analogous to what he tells us here. In Chapter 7, see the 530th session at 9:30, when he discoursed upon our frequent projection of “replica images” or “pseudophysical forms” to vividly desired locations. In the 565th session at 9:30, for Chapter 16, he used the example of one’s possible responses to a telephone call to show how all “probable actions are equally valid,” no matter which one of them is physically actualized.