Time and the Continually Changing Past

Seth's Early Sessions, Vol 5, Session 225

The idea is current in academic psychological circles that the child exists psychologically intact in the man, that the man contains within him the psychological replica of the child that was.

Such is not exactly the case. The child exists within the man, yes, but he is not the same child. The memories that he thinks are the child's memories are not memories of a particular event that happened to the child. That is, they do not contain a precise picture of any particular incident that occurred. Each incident is recreated when the memory of it arises, but the memory is changed with each recreation, and subtly changed.

The past is, then, continually changed. The electromagnetic connections themselves, that make up any particular event—these connections, even while seemingly intact, have changed. The energy that composes them is not the same, and the past is constantly altered. Nothing can stand still, including the past, and any such appearance of stability is an illusion.

It is as much an illusion to believe that the past has vanished, as it is to believe that the future does not exist. The past does not vanish, for there was no past to vanish, in those terms.

… The child does not stay in a neat psychological package, enclosed in the past and insulated from the present or the future. It is not as simple as all that.

There is no point where the child ceases and the man begins, and no point where the young man ceases and the old man begins. These are states happening simultaneously, but perceived in slow motion within your system. Not only are they perceived in slow motion, but they are perceived along one line of focus only. The focus is indeed intense, but so limited in scope that it is relatively impossible for you to keep your attention upon the self except in the most inconsistent and fleeting of ways.

You no longer perceive the past, therefore you think that it has vanished, and the self that you were has gone. But that particular moment, any particular moment, that you think of as the past, existed before your egotistical perception of it, and is constantly being changed by you, even when you no longer consciously perceive it.

For the inner self can perceive it, and does change it. The idea of inverted time states that time flows in all directions, and that as each action affects every other action, so time constantly affects itself and continually reacts within itself. The past moment is never completed. Consciously you have simply lost sight of it, and have not followed it through in its endless depths.

Some systems experience time exclusively in terms of probabilities, in which the self experiences a particular moment most thoroughly, where continuity is achieved not through a continuity of moments but a continuity of self, as it experiences all the various events that exist as probabilities for it in any given instant.

You merely skip along the surface, and this is all right. But do not regard this hopping from moment to moment, as from stone to stone, as the approximation of time as it actually exists. The nature of perceptions determines the experience of time.