“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause at 9:40.) It is not quite that simple, however, for you live in the midst of multitudinous small deaths and births all of the time, that are registered by the body and the psyche. Consciously you are usually unaware of them. Logical thought, using usual definitions, deals with cause and effect, and depends upon a straight sequence of time for its framework. It builds step upon step. It is woven into your language. According to logical thought and language you may say: “I am going to a party today because I was invited last week, and said I would attend.” That makes sense. You cannot say: “I am going to a party today because I am going to meet an individual there who will be very important to my life five years from now.” That does not make sense in terms of logical thought or language, for in the last example cause and effect would exist simultaneously — or worse, the effect would exist before the cause.

On all other-than-normally conscious levels, however, you deal very effectively with probabilities. The cells maintain their integrity by choosing one probability above the others. The present hub of the wheel, therefore, is but one prominent present, operationally valid. Cause and effect as you think of them appear only because of the motion, the relative motion, of the wheel in our analogy.

The forward motion brings you into the future, out of the past from which it seems you are emerging. So you plot a straight course, it seems, through time, never realizing in our analogy that the wheel’s circular motion allows you to transverse this ongoing road. The hub of the present, therefore, is held together by “spokes.” These have nothing to do with your ideas of cause and effect at all. Instead they refer to the circular motion of your own psyche as it seems to progress in time. Each present moment of your experience is dependent upon the future as well as the past, your death as well as your birth. Your birth and your death are built in, so to speak, together, one implied in the other.

There is no cause and effect in the terms in which you understand the words. Nor is there a succession of moments that follow one after the other; and without a succession of moments following one after the other you can see that the idea of cause and effect becomes meaningless. An action of the present in your terms cannot be based or caused by an action in the past, and neither action can be the cause of a future action in a basic reality where neither past nor future exist.

For the same reason you are also obsessed with the idea of cause and effect, with the illusion of successive time bringing forth the other. Here we have two of your most basic idea camouflage structures: your conception of time as a succession, and your idea of cause and effect.

The distortive illusion of successive moments, and of the resulting conception of cause and effect, are both on your plane the result of the observation by the outer senses, and are practical and useful on your plane and therefore have a certain validity, if for you only.

The so-called laws of cause and effect operate at a certain level of consciousness. The level of consciousness itself creates the experience of cause and effect. [...] There seems to be only because of the beliefs that cause you to limit perception. [...]

You should understand that we have been talking about Framework 1 and Framework 2. Ruburt felt, and so did you to some extent, that it was easier to experience Framework 2’s spontaneity in the mental realm of imagination—but you each felt that the physical body was tied somewhat more rigidly to the dictums of Framework 1, to cause and effect. [...]

[...] That is why I have stressed the importance of impulse, and Framework 2’s activity, for there you are not confined to cause and effect.

[...] The various unfortunate effects that seem to be caused by smoking are not caused by the cigarettes so much, as by those psychic habits which cause a personality to seek security within such habitual patterns that become compulsive.

Any action that affects the physical individual also has its reality within many other fields, and its effects and its nature are felt within them. [...] It goes without saying that such a work actually contains a portion of focused psychic energy, which is action, and which has its effects.

[...] Action will never have one effect only. [...] Whenever an action seems to have but one effect, then there is a lack in perceptive abilities.

You exist and have effects in more realities than you know, and you perceive bits and pieces of other perspectives that appear in your own dimension. This is why I have told you, long ago, that your cause and effect theory was ludicrous. [...]

[...] There is a give and take between the dream world and the physical world, and each makes or causes effects in the other.

Yet these projections or effects from your dimension into others, and from other dimensions into your own, do cause definite reactions within the plane in which they occur; and various attempts will be made, and are made to interpret them, but always within the framework of accepted, known phenomena. [...]

[...] And try, ‘cause I know you can all do it, to take your conscious awareness into the dream state. [...] And really see what you can do, ‘cause you can do stuff in the dream state with your consciousness just like you can here. [...]

[...] They got the pyramid effect, the path, the whole bit that we get. [...]

[...] Otherwise the effects just aren’t that obvious, though they are there. [...]

[...] By your attitude you are effectively forming a barrier against any financial betterment of any significant kind. You repulse the circumstances in which such betterment could take place automatically, because of the effect of your expectations.

[...] The belief will cause attractions, in which physical circumstances will change. [...]

[...] This is directly caused by the fact that you suspect such ideas as these, beneficial on theoretical grounds, but quite impractical in your actuality.

[...] One of the latest ideas is that certain mental conditions are caused by chemical imbalances. Supplying these does result in some improvement, but such inequalities do not cause any disease. [...]

[...] They are highly effective, nevertheless.

The role-playing in the dream drama would be one in which you creatively worked out the problems that caused the imbalances to begin with. [...]

These acts are not only interpreted differently, they also of course have effects which are caused not only by the initial action but also by the distortive appearance of the action in a given system. [...]

Its very appearance or projection into a second system, therefore, causes an apparent change in the act itself. To all effects and purposes such an action becomes a different one, while in actuality it is the same.

There may be the appearance of a time lapse of one kind or another between mental actions and their appearance or projection into other systems, but this is a distortive effect. Such distortive effects, such distortions, are often correlated within a given system, and accepted as a foundation for the nature of reality. [...]

[...] Whatever methods or drugs he uses will not be effective unless this change of belief takes place.

Unfortunately, when man became a labeller he also made maps, so to speak, of great complexity, categorizing various diseases with greater effectiveness than ever before. [...]

[...] Many of their techniques were adopted for their psychological shock value, in which the patient was quite effectively “brainwashed” out of the disease he believed that he had.

In larger terms there is no cause and effect either, though these are root assumptions in your reality.²

[...] We return once more to that moment of reflection, for it is here that both causes and effects first appear. [...]

[...] Because you perceive a reality of cause and effect, you hypothesize a reality in which one life affects the next one. [...]

A third of that energy on either of your parts spent on the realization that the effects are caused by beliefs, and an effort to change the beliefs, will work wonders. [...]

So beliefs about Ruburt’s body on both of your parts, but of course primarily on Ruburt’s part, must be understood as beliefs that then cause physical experience. Some of these have already begun to vanish, but both of you to some extent project them into the future, treat them as conditions in fact, and not as beliefs that cause conditions.

You become hypnotized then, both of you, by the effects. [...]

(This effect appeared shortly before vacation, on an experimental head in oil I was working on. [...] The effect cropped up before I was aware of it. I cannot be positive the sepia caused the effect without trying some deliberate experiments to see, but certainly it contributed.

The healing will show that the causes are eliminated. Other causes must not be allowed to spring up, you see. [...]

[...] The camouflage would not be effective were it less perfect. [...]

[...] I have told you that your conception of cause and effect is faulty and antiquated, and I have said that the cause and effect theory is logical only as a result of your theory of time and continuity. If time as you think of it does not exist, and it does not, then the cause and effect theory does not follow.

You see the growth process in a very distorted manner, because of your antiquated cause and effect theory. [...]

During our next session I will give you further material on the inner laws of the universe, and show you again how the so-called laws of the universe, with which your scientists deal, are sadly inadequate and the result of the same kind of distortion as your cause and effect theory.

[...] Ideas of cause and effect can hold you back here, because it seems to you that the leaves of next year come as an effect caused by this year’s leaves.¹⁰ To the plant and its innate creative pattern, however, all of its manifestations are one — an expression of itself, each portion different. [...]

And from the 521st session (after 10:17) for Chapter 4 of Seth Speaks: “The word ‘result,’ you see, automatically infers cause and effect — the cause happening before the effect — and this is simply one small example of the strength of such distortions, and of the inherent difficulties involved with verbal thought, for it always implies a single-line delineation.”

[...] Let me briefly continue that early Seth material here: “In drawing up his list of so-called natural laws, I have said (in the 16th session) that man decided that what appeared to be cause and effect to him was, therefore, a natural law of the universe. [...]

[...] The three-sided effect, instantly formed, leads to an effect that is something like friction, but the effect causes (more gestures) the three sides to change position, so that you end up with a triangular effect, closed, with the initial point inside the triangle. [...]

[...] The “initial” originating emotional energy that sets any given unit into motion, and forms it, then causes the unit to become a highly charged electromagnetic field with those characteristics of changing polarities just mentioned. The changing polarities are also caused by attraction and repulsion from other like units which may be attached or detached. [...]

“Or that something will happen to me, that will prove that there is more to life than usual cause and effect,” he said to us. [...]

[...] Smiling, hearty, Seth talked about magic and cause and effect, but at the same time he demonstrated a magic that is beyond the clever manipulation of appearances. [...]

“That’s why we don’t bother with effects that can be duplicated,” Seth suddenly said, “but with this performance and our books, which cannot be duplicated. [...]

[...] It cannot accept knowledge that comes from “elsewhere,” for such information will not fit in reason’s categories, and confounds its cause-and-effect patterning. [...]

[...] Your reasoning as you now use it, however, deals primarily with reality by dividing it into categories, forming distinctions, following the “laws” of cause and effect — and largely its realm is the examination of events already perceived. [...]

On the other hand your intuitions follow a different kind of organization, as does your imagination — one involved with associations, an organization that unifies diverse elements and brings even known events together in a kind of unity that is often innocent of the limitations dictated by cause and effect. [...]

I told you, Joseph, that I would discuss the magnetic alterations that caused me to call a quick ending to our last session. [...]

There is a preponderance of negative ions followed by an opposite effect that occurs with great rapidity immediately following sunset. [...]

[...] They can cause accidents, within your system, sudden and not always advantageous. [...]

[...] Recently he told us that his territory might be changed, effectively cutting out Elmira and including instead an area of small towns in Pennsylvania. [...]

[...] Thoughts of reconciliation or peace actually and practically do their bit to destroy the causes of war. [...]

There are deeply hidden areas of human behavior far below the surface of actions, and these cause the actions. [...]