“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) The biological structure as it existed in the past is therefore affected. Experience is built into the organism that it did not have before, in your terms. It is a sort of reprogramming. It is impossible, of course, for you to examine cellular structure now as it exists in the present and simultaneously as it existed in the past (very positively). Scientifically, you can only probe those effects that appear within your present. When you alter your beliefs today you also reprogram your past. As far as you are concerned the present is your point of action, focus, and power, and from that point of volition you form both your future and past. Realizing this, you will understand that you are not at the mercy of a past over which you have no control.

In daily practical experience, try to concentrate for a while upon seemingly subordinate abilities, ones that you think of as latent. If you do so consistently, using your imagination and will, then those abilities will become prominent in your present. The current beliefs will reprogram and alter past experience. It is not simply that past, forgotten, unconsciously perceived events will be put together in a new way and organized under a new heading, but that in that past (now not perceivable), the entire bodily response to seemingly past events will change.

A new belief in the present, however, can cause changes in the past on a neuronal level. You must understand that basically time is simultaneous. Present beliefs can indeed alter the past. In some cases of healing, in the spontaneous disappearance of cancer, for instance, or of any other disease, certain alterations are made that affect cellular memory, genetic codes, or neuronal patterns in the past.

The fact remains that there are probable past events that “can still happen” within your personal previous experience. A new event can literally be born in the past — “now.”

And you are more free than you imagine to completely alter many aspects of your own past. If you say that the future is dependent upon the past, therefore, you must also say that the past is dependent upon the future. Once more, the past was never an independent, concrete object existing apart from the perceiving participator; for he made his past, and its only reality exists in the electromagnetic connections within his own organic and psychic structure.

In other words the past and the present are real to the same extent. At times in fact the past can become more real than the present, and in such cases past actions are reacted to in the present. You take it for granted that present action can alter the future, but present actions can also alter the past.

There is of course a composite past that is composed of such individual electromagnetic connections, and this composite past is not the same past that once existed, in those terms. The past itself is being continually recreated by every individual, as attitudes and associations change. [...]

[...] Difficulties are caused when such changes in the past do not occur automatically. Such difficulties as severe neurosis are often caused precisely because the individual has not automatically changed his past. Once more, the only reality that can be assigned to the past is that granted to the symbols and associations and memory images that exist electromagnetically both within the physical brain and within the mind.

[...] Then, intensely:) To rid yourself of annoying restrictions then, my dear friend, you repattern your past from the present. Whatever your circumstances, you use the past as a rich source, looking through it for your successes, restructuring it. When you search it looking for what is wrong, then you become blind to what was right, in those terms, so that the past only mirrors the shortcomings that now face you.

[...] Examine your past with that in mind. [...] In such a way at least you are not using the past to reinforce your limitations, or projecting them into the future. It is only natural to contrast what you want with what you have, and it is very easy to become discouraged in so doing, but looking for errors in the past will not help you. [...]

[...] You are not at the mercy of the past, or of previous convictions, unless you believe that you are. If you fully comprehend your power in the present, you will realize that action at that point also alters the past, its beliefs and your reactions.

Those of you who believe in reincarnation in more or less conventional terms, can make the error of using or blaming “past” lives, organizing them through your current beliefs. It is bad enough to believe that you are at the mercy of one past, but to consider yourself helpless before innumerable previous errors from other lives puts you in an impossible situation; the conscious will is robbed of its power to act. [...]

Such an exercise is not some theoretical, esoteric, impractical method, but a very precise, volatile, and dynamic way of helping the present self by calming the fears of a past self. That past self is not hypothetical, either, but still exists, capable of being reached and of changing its reactions. You do not need a time machine to alter the past or the future.

[...] Your present gains its feeling of depth because of your past as you understand it. [...] But the roots of events go through your past, present, and future.

Dreams in which past and present are both involved are an example; also dreams in which the future and the past merge, and dreams in which time seems to be a changing ingredient.

You must remember the creativity and the open-ended nature of events, for even in one life a given memory is seldom a “true version” of a past event. [...]

The fetus itself, before its conception, responds to a self not yet physically apparent; and the future, in those terms, draws new life from the past. A reality of selfhood, an idea not yet materialized in the unformed future, reaches down into the past and brings that future into realization. [...]

[...] Voices speak through the genes and chromosomes that connect the future and the past in a balance that you call the present form. [...] The archaeology of the past and the future alike is alive within the layers of consciousness that compose your being.

An archaeologist or a geologist examining “old” rock strata will find dead fossils, just as from your viewpoint you will discover “dead” past lives as you look “downward” through your psyche. [...] They are not you, and you are not your reincarnational past.

[...] When you look out into the universe from your viewpoint, it seems as if you look into the past.⁸ Scientists tell you that when the light from every distant galaxy reaches you, the galaxy is already dead. In the same way, when you look “backward” into the psyche the life you may indistinctly view — the past life — is already vanished. Why is it that your scientists’ instruments do not allow them to look into the future instead, into worlds not yet born, since they operate so well in discerning the past? [...]

The past does have its own past, present and future, therefore. From a given past event you will only materialize a particular future, but the event itself continues, and possesses a dimensionality of its own — or rather a multidimensionality that you also possess.

[...] As you think now, “past” is still occurring. [...] Past events continue. [...]

[...] It then seems to become the past. You have only tuned into a portion of it physically, though; that past event continues to exist with its own “future,” which you may or may not perceive, according to which probable action you pull into your next experiences of actuality.

[...] There are elements in your past that are as unpredictable, however, as the elements in your future now appear to be (emphatically). There is creativity in your past waiting for you even as there is in your future, but to utilize such experiences you must learn to alter your beliefs, and to some degree escape from the particular kind of limited conscious focus that you habitually use.

For example: It is truer to say that heredity operates from the future backward into the past, than it is to say that it operates from the past into the present. Neither statement would be precisely correct in any case, because your present is a poised balance affected as much by the probable future as the probable past.

[...] Because your sense experience follows a time pattern that you can understand, then you take it for granted that a cell, for example, is the result of its past, and that its present condition arises from the past.⁴ The fetus grows into an adult, not because it is programmed from the past, but because it is to some extent precognitively aware of its probabilities, and from the “future” then imprints this information into the past structure.

[...] It should appear obvious from what I am saying that neither future nor past is predetermined. From your platform of poised now-experience, you alter both the past and the future, and that alteration, that change, that action, causes your point of immediate sense life.⁵

Their past deaths and all past deaths,

In the 256th session he said, “Because you are obsessed with the idea of past, present, and future, you are forced to think of reincarnations as strung out one before the other. Indeed we speak of past lives because you are used to the time sequence concept. [...] 145 B.C., A.D. 145, a thousand years in your past, and a thousand years in your future—all exist now.”

“Since all events occur at once in actuality, there is little to be gained by saying that a past event causes a present one. Past experience does not cause present experience. You are forming past, present, and future—simultaneously. [...]

So while Seth often explains present life problems as the result of past life difficulties, he makes it clear to those that can understand that the lives really exist simultaneously, just as three personalities can exist in one body at one time. But all problems are not the result of such “past life” influences. In one case, a friend’s hang-ups in the present originated right in this life, though her boyfriend’s were left over from the past.

[...] He went on to give Lydia a rather detailed description of a past life around the area of Bangor, Maine, in 1832, when she was a male. This was Lydia’s first Seth session and she sat wiggling nervously in her chair as Seth gave names, dates, and particular episodes of this past life.

[...] Now when you feel that you have this new image of your past self before you, then imagine that your consciousness is moving from your astral form into this past self. [...]

[...] I will give you more reincarnational data on your own lives; as you travel to the center of yourself however you will feel (underlined) and know your own pasts as directly as the circumstances permit.

[...] Next, feeling that you are in the astral form, tell yourself that from that image you will be able to see the image of the person that you were in your immediately past life.

[...] You may for example end up using this as the main method of communication between your present and your past one. [...]

[...] The past as you think of it, and the subconscious, again as you think of it, have little to do with your present experience outside of your beliefs about them. The past contains for each of you some moments of joy, strength, creativity and splendor, as well as episodes of unhappiness, despair perhaps, turmoil and cruelty. Your present convictions will act like a magnet, activating all such past issues, happy or sad. [...]

This joining of the past and present, in that context, predisposes you to similar future events, for you have geared yourself for them. Change now quite practically alters both the past and the future. For you, because of your neurological organization, the present is obviously the only point from which past and future can be changed, or when action becomes effected.

As mentioned in this book (in Chapter Four, for instance), the emerging memories will then turn on the body mechanisms, merging past and present in some kind of harmonious picture. [...]

[...] In the most intimate of terms, your past and future are modified by your present reactions. [...]

[...] When in historic terms mankind became aware of memory, and recalled his past as a past in your terms, it was possible for him to confuse past and present. [...]

The child was himself in the past on the one hand, and yet he was a probable future self in that past. (Pause.) From the standpoint of Ruburt’s official mental focus, and from the standpoint of the neurologically accepted present, that past environment had to remain off-center, or blurred. [...]

Though the past is actually quite as immediate, alive, and creative as the present is, man made certain adjustments, on several layers, that would focus definite distinctions and set past and present experience apart. [...]

[...] In time terms, the “present” animal had to be killed for food — not the “past” animal. That animal — the past one — existed as surely as the one presently perceived, yet in man’s context, physical action had to be directed to a highly specific area, for physical survival depended upon it.

Each inner self, adopting a new body, imposes upon it and upon its entire genetic makeup, memory of the past physical forms in which it has been involved. Now the present characteristics usually overshadow the past ones. [...] The physical pattern of the present body, therefore, is a genetic memory of the self’s past physical forms, and of their strengths and weaknesses. [...]

[...] These are types, representing generally and symbolically past male lives lived by present women. Women, therefore, can learn much about their reincarnational past as men, through studying those dreams in which these types appear, or in which they themselves appear as men.

[...] Often you can call up a past strength of a previous body, to help compensate for a present weakness. The body does not only carry memory biologically of its own past condition in this life therefore, but indelibly with it, even physically, are the memories of the other bodies that the personality has formed in previous reincarnations.

[...] It contains within it the knowledge of the present male’s past female histories, and the intuitive understanding of all the female qualities with which the personality is innately endowed.

“The past in our terms doesn’t cause present behavior, because you can go back now into that past and change it in our present. [...]

(Continuing chatter about going from present to past—changing past and its affect upon the present. [...]

[...] Because you can change—now this is in our physical terms—you can change what we would think of as the past through actions in our present. [...]

(Conversation back and forth between Rachel, Ruburt and others about leaving and not leaving past group and present group. [...]

Some families come together in a particular life not because of great attraction or love in a past existence, but for the opposite reason. Families may be composed, then, of individuals who disliked each other in the past and come together in a close relationship where they are to work together toward a common goal, learn to understand each other better, and work out problems in a different kind of context.

On an unconscious basis, you are aware of the birth into physical life of someone you have known in the past. The strangers that you meet in your dreams are often, of course, people now alive — contemporaries — that you have also known in past lives.

[...] These two factors together can release you from any difficulties that have arisen in past lives. [...]

[...] Only in this way, you see, would you be able to relate to the experience of womanhood, and then as a woman face those attitudes that you yourself had against women in the past.

[...] I will have something to say shortly, incidentally, concerning the ways in which you may change the past in the present, for this will be useful. First we must relieve the sensitivities and we are, and then we shall work toward the construction of a more favorable past, you see. [...]

[...] I intend to go into past-life experiences rather extensively, but in another context. The main problems with Ruburt exist as given, and when these are cleared then we will have clear access to our other material, that is, the past-life data.

[...] A point here involving Ruburt’s hands and his mother’s sweaters: he knew that knitting was a therapeutic measure suggested in the past to exercise his mother’s hands. [...]

[...] Without the trance however you will not reach buried past-life data.

[...] You are not under a sentence placed upon you for original sin, by any childhood events, or by past-life experience. [...] You may be less when you would be more, but you are not under a pall placed upon your psyche, either by original sin, Freud’s infancy syndromes, or past-life influences. I will try to explain the past-life influences a bit more clearly here. [...] One life is not buried in the past, disconnected from the present self and any future self as well.

I have also discussed reincarnation in terms of environment because many schools of thought over-emphasize the effects of reincarnational existences, so that often they explain present-life circumstances as a result of rigid and uncompromising patterns determined in a “past” life. [...]

His smoking represents the tail end of a characteristic greediness that besieged him in past lives, with smoking this time as a remnant. The greediness in the past involved many more areas. [...]

In the present personality we have abilities developed in past lives, and ability to paint for example that should be made more use of now. What you call Ruburt’s sales ability is also a result of past experiences, and certain other latent abilities such as a facility with growing plants. [...]

First, naturally, I have a few comments to make that will not only tie in Ruburt’s smoking habits with his present personality, but also to some extent tie in his present personality with past personalities.

[...] His smoking, dear Joseph, is indulged in for entirely different reasons than those reasons which impelled you to smoke, and the habit is difficult for him to break, though he is breaking it and he has made strides that are important during the past year.

“In other words, the past and present are real to the same extent. On occasion the past can become more ‘real’ than the present, and in such cases past actions are reacted to in what you call the present. You take it for granted that present action can change the future, but present actions can also change the past.

“Again: the past is as real as the future, no more or no less. For the past exists only as a pattern of electromagnetic currents within the mind and brain, and these constantly change. … An individual’s future actions are not dependent upon a concrete finished past, for such a past never existed.”

“The past is no more objective or independent from the perceiver than is the present. These electromagnetic connections that compose the past were largely made by the individual perceiver, and the perceiver is always a participator.

[...] The past is seldom what you remember it to be, for you have already rearranged it from the instant of any given event. The past is being constantly re-created by each individual as attitudes and associations change. [...]

[...] The ordinary person, for example, in the western world cannot relate to a Darwinian past in that same fashion, and psychology robs him of any personal extension in the future after death, so in practical life most modern people have freedom of extension in space but less in time. The peasants of course worked closely with the land and seasons, with earth’s natural timing, and even though such work seemed to make time go faster, in the overall the sense of present time included a rich dimension from both present and past, so that in your terms it would seem longer by contrast —richer—when people went to bed earlier, lacking the night’s electricity. [...]

[...] Those Italian villages exemplified really a kind of consciousness, or an orientation of consciousness, that existed before modern psychology and Darwinian belief: a framework of consciousness and experience that was overall similar in the recent past and in the time of the Romans—one, in other words, that existed up into the present. [...]

[...] If they were isolated in spatial terms, they extended their imaginations and to some extent their lives and emotions both backward into the past and ahead into the future in ways that modern psychology has made most difficult. [...]

[...] They and the land seemed one, sharing the present seasons, the daily work—but more than that, their fathers and their forefathers and usually many past generations of given families came from the same area. [...]

[...] Its experience however is rooted in the past, as you think of the past. Since there is actually only a spacious present this means that the self is rooted both in the past and in the future, using your terms.

Because you are obsessed with the idea of time as past, present and future, you are forced to think of reincarnations as strung out one before the other, and indeed we speak of past lives simply because you are used to the time sequence concept. [...] To make the concept understandable to you it is convenient to speak of past and future reincarnations.

A hundred and forty-five B.C., a hundred and forty-five A.D., a thousand years in your past and a thousand years in your present—all exist now. Therefore the past existences are present existences. [...] You simply do not recognize that the so-called past exists now as surely as the so-called future exists now.

Past experience does not cause present experience. You are forming both past, present and future experience simultaneously. [...]