“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.