“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This talent for using energy to form unit patterns is elemental, not only on your plane but in all other planes. It involves drawing upon the basic vitality of the universe in using the inner senses, and actually pulling to oneself more and more of this underlaying vitality. Lest this suggest images of graspy potbellied souls, gluttonously grabbing the stuff of the universe for themselves out of the mouths of the less ambitious, let me hasten to inform you that such is not the case.

In the first place this vitality is self-generating and limitless, and we shall go into origins, reasons and so forth all in due time. Nevertheless as you do not deprive another of breath as you breathe, so you do not deprive another of the vitality of the universe simply by the act of using it yourself.

We have, I believe, used the analogy of air, comparing it to the vitality of the universe in one of our previous sessions. As air is dispelled from the lungs in various forms and used and reused without any loss of power, strength or quantity, so is the vitality of which we speak used in different manners. So does it enter as one thing many times, and so does it emerge as something different many times; and so does it change shape and content, and so does it show many faces and yet never disappears. And as air seems invisible so does this vitality seem invisible, and yet like air this vitality gives shape to every object that you see, and so does it form every camouflage. Without it all camouflage would vanish. And so the ability to use this vitality well is as necessary to life as is the necessity to use air for breathing.

Now I wish to make another point along these lines. No one, I am sure, denies the existence of air because ordinarily you do not see it. No one denies the existence of air because they do not understand the method by which their own lungs breathe. Yet they know that they breathe, and they know that without breath death is inevitable. To deny the existence of air would seem ridiculous. It is just as ridiculous to deny this vitality because it is usually unseen, or because you do not understand how you use it.

It is on your part more than anything else, a simple refusal to admit into existence anything that is not a camouflage pattern. Camouflage patterns are of course, with again some exceptions, essentials on any plane, since each type represents the actual form of the plane and the various characteristics within it. Nevertheless it is possible, and actually much more efficient and simple, to accept this fact and also realize and admit the inner vitality behind the camouflage.

The part of you who dreams is the “I” as much as the part of you that operates in any other manner. The part of you who dreams is the part of you who breathes. And this part is certainly as legitimate and actually more necessary to you as a whole unit, as far as survival on your physical plane is concerned, than the part that also plays bridge or Scrabble. It would seem ludicrous to suppose that such a vital matter as breathing would be left to a subordinate and almost completely divorced poor-relative sort of a lesser personality.

As breathing is carried on in a manner that seems automatic to the conscious mind, so this important function of transforming the vitality of the universe into pattern units also 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 therefore it seems as if this transformation is carried on by someone even more distant and alien than the unrecognized part of yourself that breathes.

Because you know that somehow you breathe, without consciously being aware of the actual mechanics being involved, you are forced despite your inclinations to admit that you do do your own breathing. When you cross a room you are forced to admit that you have caused yourself to cross the room, even though consciously you have no idea of willing the muscles to move or of stimulating one muscle or another; and yet even there, though you admit these things, you do not believe them. In your quiet unguarded moments you still say who breathes, who dreams, and even who moves? How much easier it would be to admit freely and wholeheartedly the simple fact that you are not consciously aware of important vital parts of yourself, and that you are more than you know you are.

Because I say that you actually create the typical camouflage patterns of your own physical universe yourselves, by use of the inner vitality of the universe in the same manner that you form a pattern with your breath on a glass pane, I do not necessarily mean that you are the creators of the universe. I merely am saying that you are the creators of the physical world as you know it—and herein, my beloved friends, lies a vast tale.

The intellect is extremely important in the manipulation of camouflage patterns once they are created. You have made your world, and your intellect should help you deal with what you have created. It has other vital functions which I shall enumerate at a later date. However, I cannot say this too often: You are more than your conscious mind, much more, and the self which you do not admit happens to be the portion of yourself which not only insures your own survival in the physical universe which it has made, but which is also the connective portion of yourself with inner reality. Which is, when all is said and done, the only basic reality; and which also continually enables you to create these camouflage patterns, and which contains knowledge and intuitions and memories which you need in a most desperate manner if you are ever to understand yourselves, and if the race of mankind is ever to evolve to its fullest.