“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.”

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.

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.