Personal Reality, Session 656
What you must
understand is this: Each of the events in each of your lives was “once” probable. From a given field of action, then, you
choose those happenings that will be physically materialized.
This operates in
individual and mass terms. Suppose that
today your home was robbed. Yesterday, the theft was one of innumerable
probable events. I chose such an example
because more than one person would have to be involved – the victim and the
robber. Why was your home ransacked, and
not your neighbor’s? In one way or
another, through your conscious thought you attracted such an event, and drew
it from probability into actuality. The
occurrence would be an accumulation of energy – turned into action – and be
brought about by corollary beliefs.
You may be
convinced that human nature is evil, or that no one is safe from another’s
aggression, or that people are motivated mainly by greed. Such beliefs attract their own reality. If you have anything worth losing, you are
then automatically convinced that someone else will take it from you, or try
their hardest to do so. In your own way
you send out messages to just such a person.
On basic levels your convictions will be quite similar, but one will see
himself as the victim and one as the aggressor – that is, each of you will
react differently to the same set of beliefs.
However the two of you are necessary if a crime of that nature is, or is
to be, committed.
The beliefs of both
of you find justification in physical life, and only reinforce themselves. The fear of robbers attracts robbers. If you think that men are evil, however, you
are often not able to examine that as a belief, but take it as a condition of
reality.
All of your present
experience was drawn from probable reality.
During our life, any event must come through your creaturehood, with the
built-in time recognition that is so largely a part of your neurological structure;
so usually there is a lag, a lapse in time, during which your beliefs cause
material actualization. When you try to
change your conviction in order to change your experience, you also have to
first stop the momentum that you have already built up, so to speak. You are changing the messages while the body
is used to reacting smoothly, unquestioningly, to a certain set of beliefs.
There is a steady
even flow in which conscious activity through the neurological structure brings
about events, and a familiar pattern of reaction is established. When you alter these conscious beliefs
through effort, then a period of time is necessary while the structure learns
to adjust to the new preferred situation.
If beliefs are changed overnight, comparatively less time is required.
In a manner of
speaking, each belief can be seen as a powerful station, pulling to it from
fields of probabilities only those signals to which it is attuned, and blocking
out all others. When you set up a new station there may be some static or
bleed-through from an old one for a while.
Any ability you
have, then, can be “brought in more clearly”, amplified, and become practical
rather than probable. But is such a case
you must concentrate upon the attribute – not, for example, upon the fact that
you have not used it well thus far.
An artist produces
a body of work in his lifetime. Each
painting is but one materialization, one focused presentation, of an endless
variety of probable paintings. The
actual work involved in the selection of data is still made according to the
beliefs in the artist’s conscious mind as to who he is, how good an artist he is,
what kind of artist he is, what “school” of artistic beliefs he
subscribes to, his ideas of society and his place in it, and esthetic and
economic values, to name but a few.
The same sort of
thing operates in the actualization of any event in which you are
involved. You create your life, then. Inner images are of great importance to the
artist. He tries to project them upon
his canvas or board. Again, you are each
your own artist, and your inner visualizations become models for other
situations and events. The artist
utilizes training and mixes his colors in order to give artistic flesh to his
paintings. The images in your mind draw
to themselves all the proper emotional energy and power needed to fill them
out as physical events.
You can change the
picture of your life at any time if only you realize that it is simply the one
portrait of yourself that you have created from an unlimited amount of probable
ones. The peculiar aspect of your own
probable portraits will still be characteristic of you, and no other.
The abilities,
strengths and variants that you may want to actualize are already latent, in
your terms, and at your disposal. Suppose
that you are unhealthy and desire health.
If you understand the nature of probabilities, you will not need to pretend
to ignore the present situation. You
will recognize it instead as a probable reality that you have physically
materialized. Taking that for granted,
you will then begin the process necessary to bring a different probability into
physical experience.
You will do this by
concentrating upon what you want, but feeling no conflict between that and what
you have, because one will not contradict the other; each will be seen as a
reflection of belief in daily life. As
it took some time to build up your present image with its unhealthy aspects, so
it may take time to change that picture.
But concentration upon the present unhealthy situation will only
prolong it.
Each condition is
as real or unreal as the other. Which
you? Which world? You have your choice, broadly, within certain
frameworks that you have chosen as a part of your creaturehood. 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. You will choose from your previous
experience all of those events that reinforce your conscious beliefs,
and so ignore those that do not; the latter may even seem to be nonexistent.
As mentioned in the
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.
This means that the pieces will fit together whether they are joyful or
not.
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.
I am not speaking
symbolically. In the most intimate of
terms, our past and future are modified by your present reactions. Alterations occur within the body. Circuits within the nervous system are
changed, and energies that you do not understand seek out new connection on
much deeper levels far beyond consciousness.
Your present
beliefs govern the actualization of events.
Creativity and experience are being formed moment by moment by each
individual.
You must understand
that your present is the point at which flesh and matter meet with the
spirit. Therefore the present is your
point of power in your current lifetime, as you think of it. If you assign greater force to the past, then
you will feel ineffective and deny yourself your own energy.
For an exercise,
sit with your eyes wide open, looking about you, and realize that this moment
represents the point of your power, through which you can affect both past and
future events.
The present seen
before you, with its intimate physical experience, is the result of action in other
such presents. Do not be intimidated
therefore by the past or the future.
There is no need at all for undesirable aspects of your contemporary
reality to be projected into the future, unless you use the power of the
present to do so.
If you learn to get
hold of this feeling of power now, you can use it most effectively to alter
your life situation in whatever way you choose – again, within those
limitations set by your creaturehood. If
you were born without a limb, for example, your power in the present cannot
automatically regenerate it in this life, although in other systems of
reality you do possess that limb. (See
Seth’s Preface, as well as the 615th session in Chapter Two.)
Exterior conditions
can always be changed if you understand the principles of which I am
speaking. Diseases can be eliminated,
even those that seem fatal – but only if the beliefs behind them are erased or
altered enough so that their specific focusing effect upon the body is
sufficiently released. The present as
you think of it, and in practical working terms, is that point at which you select
your physical experience from all those events that could be
materialized. Your physical
circumstances change automatically as your beliefs do. As your knowledge grows, so your experience
becomes more fulfilling. This does not necessarily
mean that it evens out in any way, or that there are not peaks and
valleys. Each aspiration presupposes the
admission of a lack, each challenge presupposes a barrier to be overcome. The more adventurous will often choose
greater challenges, and so in their minds the contrasts between what they want
to achieve and their present status can seem to be impossible.
In each case,
however, the point of power is the present, and from that moment you
choose which you, and which world. The
experience of a country is the cumulative result of the choice of each
individual in it, so as you choose your circumstances you affect each other
person within your country and your world.
In many “native”
cultures an individual is not considered in terms of his age at all, and the
numbering of years is regarded as insignificant. In fact, a man may not know his age as you
think of it. It would do you all good –
young, middle-aged and old alike – to forget the number of your years, because
in your culture so many beliefs are limiting in those ways. Youth is denied its wisdom and old age is
denied its joy.
To pretend
to ignore your age, to act young because you fear your age, is no answer. (See
the 644th session in Chapter Eleven.) In your terms your point of reality and power
is, once more, in your current experience.
A realization of this would allow you at any age to draw upon qualities
and knowledge that “existed” in your past or “will exist” in your future. Your ages are probable [simultaneous].
Although time does
not basically exist as you “know” it, you are neurologically forced to perceive
your life as a series of passing moments.
As creatures you are born young and grow older. Yet the animals, as creatures, are not as
limited in their experience in that regard.
They have no beliefs in old age that automatically shut down their
abilities; so left alone, while the do physically die as all creatures must in those
terms, they do not deteriorate in the same way.
You do not
understand the communications between your selves and pets, for example, where
in their own way they interpret and react to your beliefs. They mirror your ideas, then, and so become
vulnerable as they would not be in their natural circumstances. In greater terms their relationship with you is
natural, of course, but their innate realization that the creature’s point of
power is in the present is to some degree undermined by their own receptivity
and translation of your beliefs. A young
kitten is treated differently than an older one. The cat responds to such conditioning, In the same way your own conclusions about
age become fact in your experience. In
line with them, if you could convince yourself that you were ten years younger,
or ten years older, then it would be faithfully reflected in your personal
environment.
If you were
twenty, you would be able to draw upon the wisdom you imagine you would have at
thirty.
If you were sixty, you
would be able to use the physical strength you imagined was denied you now, but
available then. All of this would be
physically and biologically expressed within your body as well.
Which you? Which world?
If you are lonely it is because you believe in your loneliness in this
present point that you acknowledge as time.
From what seems to be the past you draw only those memories that
reinforce your condition, and you project those into the future. Physically, you are overwhelming your body as
it responds to a state of loneliness through chemical and hormonal reactions. You are also denying your own point of action
within the present.
Vitamins, better
food, medical attention, may temporarily rejuvenate the body, but unless you
change your beliefs it will quickly become swamped again by your feelings of
depression. In such a case you must
realize that you make your own loneliness, and resolve to change through both
thought and action. Action is
thought in physical motion, outwardly perceived.
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