It’s great to talk about how our thoughts create our experiences but how can you change your thoughts if they are unconscious? How can I change thoughts or attitudes when I don’t even know I have them? What if my current experiences are being influenced by past lives? What if some of my attitudes and behavior are the result of childhood experiences that I have forgotten or suppressed?
[Please see my article from Venture Inward entitled “Things Are Thoughts.”]
One of the sayings that Seth strongly emphasizes is: “The point of power is in the present.” In The Nature of Personal Reality, Seth talks about this idea and repeats it over and over. It is central to any discussion of the feedback system and it explains why we don’t need to know the cause of our current problems or issues.
I have already mentioned that I see life as a dream. I see it as a dream in the sense that all of our waking experiences are meaningful just as our dream experiences are meaningful. Just as dreams are filled with symbols and metaphors, so our waking life experiences can be seen as symbolic and metaphoric.
If I dream about aunt Maude, then aunt Maude obviously has some symbolic meaning to me. She represents some part of me, perhaps some attitude or behavior I need to look at. Why wouldn’t aunt Maude represent the same thing in my waking life? Why wouldn’t every person and every situation in my waking life give me the same feedback as my dreams? I believe they do.
So it really doesn’t matter if we are being influenced in the present by our past lives, by unconscious childhood experiences, or from any other source, conscious or unconscious. Our night dreams and waking experiences all give us feedback about our thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, expectations, fears, worries, etc.
Here’s where spirituality turns physical reality on its head. Physical reality is solidly based on cause and effect. “I am neurotic because of stressful potty training.” “I have a fear of water because of a past life in which I drowned.” “I have abandonment issues because I was adopted.” You can make your own cause and effect list, at least for those things of which you are conscious.
One of the radical views taken by numerous spiritual systems and now by some quantum physicists is that space and time are fictions. Seth says so, Edgar Cayce says so, and quantum physics says so. This puts a whole new spin on the cause and effect universe in which we think we live.
If time is simultaneous, how can I have karma over some incident that is happening right now and continues to happen right now? When time gets slippery, we could end up punishing someone before they commit a crime. Instead of our lives being in a nice neat chronological line, I could end up being reincarnated into the past as easily as the future.
But what does this have to do with the feedback system? The saying that the point of power is in the present gives us a startling insight into understanding our unconscious thoughts as well as the most direct path to changing our lives.
It isn’t necessary to figure out why we feel the way we do, why we act the way we do, why we have the fears, doubts, and blocks that we experience every day. In the spiritual realm there is no traditional cause and effect. I am not the way I am today because of something that happened in my past life or something that happened in my childhood.
My current self-image and behavior represent something I believe about myself right now. The spiritual work we do is to try to change that self-image into a better version of the self. My past lives and childhood experiences are nothing but metaphors I can use to make the changes I wish to make, focusing agents for change. Dreams provide other metaphors for the same purpose. Meditation and visualization can provide symbols and metaphors we can use to change our lives.
One of the most powerful things we can do right now is let go of the energy of our past lives. We can let go of the energy and influence of our childhood experiences. We can recognize that the past has absolutely no power over us. Our current self-image, our current experiences, our current issues and problems are the result of our present beliefs, attitudes, etc. They are not the result of anything from the past or future.
