“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Give us a moment… Your sense perception, physically speaking, is a result of behavior on the part of organs that seem to you to have no reality outside of their relationship with you. Those organs are themselves composed of atoms and molecules with their own consciousnesses. They have, then, their own states of sensation and cognition. They work for you, allowing you to perceive physical reality.

Your ears certainly seem to be permanent appendages, and so do your eyes. You say: “My eyes are blue,” or “My ears are small.” The physical matter of those sense organs changes constantly, however, with you none the wiser. While your body appears quite dependable, solid, [and] steady, you are not aware of the constant interchanges that occur between it and the physical environment. It does not bother you one whit that the physical substance of your body is made up of completely different atoms and molecules than it was composed of seven years ago, [say], or that your familiar hands are actually innocent of any smallest smidgen of matter that composed them [even in recent times past].

You perceive your body as solid. Again, the very senses that make such a deduction are the result of the behavior of atoms and molecules literally coming together to form the organs, filling a pattern of flesh. All other objects that you perceive are formed in their own way in the same fashion.

A chair is a chair for your purposes. As Ruburt speaks for me he sits in one. As you read this book you most probably lounge on a chair or couch or bench — all quite sturdy and real. The atoms and molecules within those chairs and couches are quite alert, though you do not grant them the quality of life. When children play ring-around-the-rosy, they form living circles in the air. In that game they enjoy the motion of their bodies, but they do not identify with those swirling circles. The atoms and molecules that make up a chair play a different kind of ring-around-the-rosy, and are involved in constant motion, forming a certain pattern that you perceive as a chair.

The differences in motion are so divergent that to you the chair, like your body, appears permanent. The atoms and molecules, like the children, enjoy their motion — solidly sketched in space from your perspective, however, with no “idea” that you consider that motion a chair, or so use it.

You perceive the atoms’ activity in that fashion. [Nevertheless] the agreement takes place at mental levels, and is never completely “set,” though it appears to be. No one perceives the same chair [all of the time], though perhaps a given chair will seem to be “the same one” seen from different angles.

The dance of the atoms and molecules is continuous in your area. In greater terms, any given chair is never the same chair. All of this must be taken into consideration when we discuss mass events.