“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

You do this personally in your intimate lives to some degree also, as you view your earlier days. You blot out events that do not fit your present concept of yourself. They literally become nonexistent as far as you are concerned. In such fashion you block out aspects of your own reality — and consciously, at least, cut down on your choices.

10. Among the sessions for Personal Reality in which Seth stressed that “the present is the point of power,” see the 657th in Chapter 15.