“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now your closest environment, physically speaking, is your body. It is not like some manikin-shape in which you are imprisoned, that exists apart from you like a casing. Your body is not beautiful or ugly, healthy or deformed, swift or slow simply because this is the kind of body that was thrust upon you indiscriminately at birth. Instead your physical form, your corporeal personal environment, is the physical materialization of your own thoughts, emotions, and interpretations.

Quite literally, the “inner self” forms the body by magically transforming thoughts and emotions into physical counterparts. You grow the body. Its condition perfectly mirrors your subjective state at any given time. Using atoms and molecules, you build your body, forming basic elements into a form that you call your own.

You accept and perceive and focus upon continuities and similarities as you perceive physical objects of any kind, and in a very important manner you shut out and ignore dissimilarities out of a given field of actuality. Therefore you are very highly discriminating, accepting certain qualities and ignoring others. Your bodies not only change completely every seven years, for example. They change constantly with each breath.

(10:12.) Within the flesh, atoms and molecules constantly die and are replaced. The hormones are in a constant state of motion and alteration. Electromagnetic properties of skin and cell continually leap and change, and even reverse themselves. The physical matter that composed your body a moment ago is different in important ways from the matter that forms your body in this instant.

If you perceived the constant change within your body with as much persistence as you attend to its seemingly permanent nature, then you would be amazed that you ever considered the body as one more or less constant, more or less cohesive, entity. Even subjectively you focus upon and indeed manufacture the idea of a relatively stable, relatively permanent conscious self. You stress those ideas and thoughts and attitudes that you recall from “past” experience as your own, completely ignoring those that once were “characteristic” and now are vanished — ignoring the fact also that you cannot hold thought. The thought of a moment before, in your terms, vanishes away.

(Now Seth briefly discussed some out-of-body episodes that Jane had experienced yesterday afternoon.)