“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The sense of smell also seems to leap forward. A man can smell quite a stink, even though it is not right under his nose. The sense of touch, as you are consciously familiar with it, does not seem to leap out in this manner. Unless the hand itself presses upon a surface in some manner then you do not feel that you have touched it. Touch usually involves contact of a direct sort. You can of course feel the invisible wind against your cheek, but touch involves an immediacy different from the distant perceptions of sight and smell.

The physical body is a camouflage pattern operating in a larger camouflage pattern. But the physical body and all camouflage patterns, looked at in another manner, are also transformers of the vital inner stuff of the universe, where this vitality is then enabled to operate under new and various conditions.

The conscious mind deals directly with survival as far as the particular camouflage patterns are concerned. But there is no actual dividing line or distinction between the conscious and the subconscious, nor among the apparent levels of the subconscious itself.

I want you to take a break but first I want to make one other point, and that is this: The mind contains the conscious and the subconscious, but the conscious and the subconscious are fluid. At various times the consciousness becomes unconscious, and the unconscious becomes conscious. During some periods this happens simultaneously. I will go into this in great detail.

The camouflage patterns of course do belong to the inner world also, since the camouflages themselves are formed from the vitality stuff of the universe by mental enzymes, which have a chemical reaction on your plane. The reaction of course being a distortion. That is, any camouflage pattern at all is bound to be a distortion, in a sense, of vitality forced into a particular form.

This sense would permit our man to feel the basic sensations felt by the tree, so that instead of looking at the tree his consciousness would expand to contain the experience of what it is like to be a tree. According to his proficiency, in a like manner he would feel the experience of being the intervening grass and so forth.

He would in no way lose consciousness of who he was, and he would perceive these experiences, again, somewhat in the same manner that you perceive heat and cold. In your camouflage pattern you must adapt yourself to the effects of heat and cold, but our man in the inner world would not be under any such obligation. I am speaking now only of our first inner sense.