“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

He says, ‘I breathe, but who breathes, since consciously I cannot tell myself to breathe or not to breathe?’ He says, ‘I dream. But who dreams? I cannot tell myself to dream or not to dream.’ He cuts himself in half and then wonders why he is not whole. Man has admitted only those things he could see, smell, touch or hear; and in so doing, he could only appreciate half of himself. And when I say half, I exaggerate; he is aware of only a third of himself.

If man does not know who breathes within him, and if man does not know who dreams within him, it is not because there is one self who acts in the physical universe and another who dreams and breathes. It is because he has buried the part of himself which breathes and dreams. If these functions seem so automatic as to be performed by someone completely divorced from himself, it is because he has done the divorcing.

As breathing is carried on in a manner that seems automatic to the conscious mind, so the important function of transforming the vitality of the universe into pattern units seems to be carried on automatically. But this transformation is not as apparent to the one part of yourself that you are pleased to recognize, and so it seems as if this transformation is carried on by someone even more distant than your breathing and dreaming selves.

Because you know that you breathe, without being consciously aware of the mechanics involved, you are forced to admit that you do your own breathing. When you cross a room, you are forced to admit that you have caused yourself to do so, though consciously you have no idea of willing the muscles to move, or of stimulating one tendon or another. Yet even though you admit these things, you do not really believe them.

In your quiet unguarded moments, you still say, ‘Who breathes? Who dreams? Who moves?’ How much easier it would be to admit freely and wholeheartedly the simple fact that you are not consciously aware of vital parts of yourself and that you are more than you think you are.

Man, for example, trusts himself much more when he says ‘I will read,’ and then he reads, than he does when he says, ‘I will see,’ and then he sees. He remembers having learned to read, but he does not remember having learned to see, and what he cannot consciously remember, he fears.

The fact is that although no one taught him to see, he sees. The part of himself that did ‘teach’ him to see still guides his movements, still moves the muscles of his eyes, still becomes conscious despite him when he sleeps, still breathes for him without thanks or recognition and still carries on his task of transforming energy from an inner reality into an outer one. Man becomes trapped by his own artifically divided self.

It is convenient not to be consciously aware of each breath you take, but it is sheer stupidity to ignore the inner self which does the breathing and is aware of the mechanics involved. I have said that the mind is a part of the inner world, but you have access to your own minds, which you ignore; and this access would lead you inevitably to truths about the outer world. Working inward, you could understand the outward more clearly.

I cannot say this too often — you are far more than the conscious mind, and the self which you do not admit is the portion that not only insures your own physical survival in the physical universe which it has made, but which is also the connective between yourself and inner reality. … It is only through the recognition of the inner self that the race of man will ever use its potential.

If the twenty-third session roused me to write the poem, it also impressed Rob deeply enough so that he tried a rather complicated experiment with the inner senses — without letting his conscious mind know what he was up to.