“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If the cells did not die and were not replenished, the physical image would not continue to exist, so now in the present, as you know it, your consciousness flickers about your ever-changing corporeal image.

In many ways you can compare your consciousness as you know it now to a firefly, for while it seems to you that your consciousness is continuous, this is not so. It also flickers off and on, though as we mentioned earlier, it is never completely extinguished. Its focus is not nearly as constant as you suppose, however. So as you are alive in the midst of your own multitudinous small deaths, so though you do not realize it, you are often “dead,” even amid the sparkling life of your own consciousness.

Remember this is an analogy, so that the word “instant” should not be taken too literally. There is, then, what we can call an underside of consciousness. Now, in the same way, atoms and molecules exist so that they are “dead,” or inactive within your system, then alive or active, but you cannot perceive the instant in which they do not exist. Since your bodies and your entire physical universe are composed of atoms and molecules, then I am telling you that the entire structure exists in the same manner. It flickers off and on, in other words, and in a certain rhythm, as, say, the rhythm of breath.