How to Replace Unwanted Memories of the Past With Empowering Beliefs About Yourself

HJ: Traumatic of perceived ‘negative’ events can create severe disturbances and distortions in our life well beyond the moment in which they actually happened.  Typically these types of events and the associated emotional charges they generate follow people throughout their entire lives unless they make a conscious decision to address, heal, accept and ultimately release them from their lives.  Until this process is completed, anytime a situation arises that in some way reminds one of this past event, the associated mental, physical and emotional responses that occurred when the original traumatic experience happened are triggered and one tends to react to the present event in the same dysfunctional way.  This is not necessary, and with a little effort, can be healed and released permanently.

What a liberating concept!  Your past suffering and trauma can be released permanently from your life and you can be free to experience life in a healthy, empowering way that more accurately reflects the true nature of reality.  Is this not a big part of ending much of the conflict, strife and suffering that humanity currently faces?  It most certainly is.

And here, in eloquent, succinct form, Seth presents us with a method to do so.  Besides an explanation of how this technique works on the meta-physical level, Seth does not go into a terrible amount of detail explaining the subtleties and nuances of how to practice, but it’s not terribly important either.  The framework he presents is more than enough to begin practicing this technique and seeing the very real effects in ones life.  In a way, he gives a shamanic explanation — one that encourage direct experience rather than endless analysis.  Ultimately, one must trust their direct experience as truth, for the only real experience is that which originates from within.

– Truth

Changing the Past in Your Mind

Seth via Jane Roberts | Seth Learning Center

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One event can be actualized by more than one probable self, however, and you will resemble some probable selves more than others. Because you are involved in an intricate psychological gestalt such as this, and because the connections mentioned earlier do exist, you can avail yourself to some extent of abilities and knowledge possessed by these other probable portions of your personality.

The connections make for quite constant ‘bleed-throughs.’ Once you are aware of the probable system, however, you will also learn to become alert to what I will here call ‘benign intrusive impulses.’ Such impulses would seem to be disconnected from your own current interests or activities; intrusive in that they come quickly into consciousness, with a sense of strangeness as if they are not your own. These can often offer clues of various kinds. You may know absolutely nothing about music, for example, and one afternoon while in the middle of some mundane activity be struck by a sudden impulse to buy a violin.

Such an impulse could be an indication that another probable portion of your identity is gifted with that instrument. I am not telling you to run off and buy one, but you could however act on the impulse as far as is reasonably possible – renting a violin, simply acquainting yourself with violin concerto, etc.

You would learn the instrument far quicker, you see, if the impulse was originating with a probable self It goes without saying then that probable selves exist in your ‘future’ as well as your past. It is very poor policy to dwell negatively on unpleasant aspects of the past that you know, because some portions of the probable self may still be involved in that past. The concentration can allow greater bleed-through and adverse identification, because that part will be one background that you have in common with any probable selves who sprang from that particular source.

To dwell upon the possibility of illness or disaster is equally poor policy, for you set up negative webs of probabilities that need not occur. You can theoretically alter your own past as you have known it, for time is no more something divorced from you than probabilities are.

The past existed in multitudinous ways. You only experienced one probable past. By changing this past in your mind, now, in your present, you can change not only its nature but its effect, and not only upon yourself but upon others.

Pretend a particular event happened that greatly disturbed you. In your mind imagine it not simply wiped out, but replaced by another event of more beneficial nature. Now this must be done with great vividness and emotional validity, and many times. It is not a self-deception. The event that you choose will automatically be a probable event, which did in fact happen, though it is not the event you chose to perceive in your given probable past.

Telepathically, if the process is done correctly, your idea will also affect any people who were connected with the original event, though they can choose to reject as well as accept your version.

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This is not a book on techniques, so I will not go into this particular method deeply, but merely mention it here. Remember, however, that in a most legitimate way many events that are not physically perceived or experienced are as valid as those that are, and are as real within your own invisible psychological environment.

There are in your terms, then, unlimited probable future events for which you are now setting groundworks. The nature of the thoughts and feelings you originate and those that you habitually or characteristically receive set a pattern, so you will choose from those probable futures those events that will physically become your experience.

Because there are bleed-throughs and interconnections, it is possible for you to tune into a ‘future event,’ say of an unfortunate nature, an event for which you are headed if you continue on your present course. A dream about it, for instance, may so frighten you that you avoid the event and do not experience it. If so, such a dream is a message from a probable self who did experience the event.

So can a child then in a dream receive such communications from a probable future self, of such a nature that its life is completely changed. The entire identity is being now. All divisions are merely illusions, so one probable self can hold out a helping hand to another, and through these inner communications the various probable selves in your terms begin to understand the nature of their identity.

Seth adds more about this exercise in ‘The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events’

Now: In certain terms the past, present, and future [of your present life] are all compressed in any given moment of your experience.

Any such moment is therefore a gateway into all of your existence. The events that you recognize as happening now are simply specific and objective, but the most minute element in any given moment’s experience is also symbolic of other events and other times. Each moment is then like a mosaic, only in your current life history you follow but one color or pattern, and ignore the others. As I have mentioned [in other books], you can indeed change the present to some extent by purposefully altering a memory event. That kind of synthesis can be used in many instances with many people.

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.

Such a technique is highly valuable. Not only are memories not ‘dead,’ they are themselves ever-changing. Many alter themselves almost completely without your notice. In his (unpublished) apprentice novels, Ruburt (Jane) did two or three versions of an episode with a priest he had known in his youth. Each version at the time he wrote it represented his honest memory of the event. Note? the bare facts were more or less the same, the? entire meaning and interpretation of each version differed so drastically that those differences far outweighed the similarities.

Because the episode was used on two or three different occasions, Ruburt could see how this memory changed. In most cases, however, people are not aware that memory changes in such a fashion, or that the events they think they recall are so different.

The point is that past events grow. They are not finished. With that in mind, you can see that future lives are very difficult to explain from within your framework. A completed life in your terms is no more completed or done than any event. There is simply a cutoff point in your focus from your framework, but it is as artificial as, basically, perspective is applied to painting.

It is not that the inner self is not aware of all of this, but that it has already chosen a framework, or a given frame of existence, that emphasizes certain kinds of experience over others.

Session 806, p.59

Session 566, Page 232