“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the back of your mind is one question that I have avoided for many reasons. One of the main reasons for my avoiding it was the necessity of giving prerequisite material so that the answer would be at least partially comprehensible.

The patterns evolve according to certain laws. They merely reflect the ideas behind them, and these ideas you must realize originate from different sources. They originate in the subconscious, it is true, but before this an idea quality is received by the inner senses. Sometimes this idea quality is received as intuition, where it sparks into the conscious mind. But the conscious ego is the primary manipulator of camouflage patterns and the obvious mover. The actual material from which camouflage patterns are formed is the vitality which exists and which is unconsciously used by your personalities.

This actual gathering up of prime vitality for the purpose of physical construction is not however truly automatic, and it is not truly performed unconsciously. The strong self-conscious self of which I have spoken, the self-conscious self of which your own personality is not aware, this self that faces into the inner world of reality, quite consciously draws upon the vitality and stuff of what is.

The conscious ego then manipulates this material for the purposes of camouflage constructions. The transformation of vitality into physical properties is done by this self-conscious self that faces the inner world. The subconscious is the link between these two self-consciousnesses, and here you find an acceptance by the camouflage personality of the materials at hand.

At the same time the camouflage consciousness cannot be aware of the actual originator, and therefore must look for causes from the outside. In your dual system, that is, the two self-consciousnesses are more divided and alien to themselves than need be. The old idea of spirits pervading all physical matter actually represents an intuitive glimpse into reality that your sciences will finally arrive at in a long labored manner.

You can see now why the problem of creation does not really exist in the terms that you first thought of it. During one session I mentioned that since self-consciousness even exists in all living things, then the question of the exact entrance be specified becomes irrelevant.

When your friend Philip innocently asked at what point human consciousness entered the picture, his question was not pertinent. Human consciousness involves entity consciousness, and entity consciousness asserted itself at the very first phase of physical materialization.

(A few days ago, while doing some painting, the idea had popped into my conscious mind unbidden that the very act of painting a picture involved the construction of a plane. I had mentioned it to Jane at the time. Resume at 10:03.)

(Seth’s following answer, through Jane, tallied so closely with the words forming in my own mind that once again, as in the 28th session, I wondered if telepathy might be involved, as in the case of John Bradley.)

War does not exist on other planes. It exists on your plane as a byproduct of certain challenges which the creator-entities wished to solve through materialization. I have known that these questions were on your minds.

The self-conscious self on the other side of the subconscious has a freer hand in the creation of your dreams, since you are the only personality to whom they must be comprehensible. The camouflage world must be dependable, therefore you do not have such individualistic freedom.

Those who have extremely strong hidden self-conscious selves have the need for greater use of individuality, and these people therefore create what could be called another plane in waking hours, through the use of art forms.

In the creation of art forms, both self-consciousnesses are allowed with certain reservations to work together. The subconscious channel between them is allowed to open to a great degree. The product of such merging is extremely individualistic, and yet more comprehensible to others than say a fragment from the dream world.

Nevertheless it also partakes of the strange unity that unites all personalities beneath the camouflage pattern, while at the same time it is only partially connected to the camouflage pattern. In some respects art creations are a meeting of the dream world and the world of camouflage patterns, but in a deeper way art creations represent the appearance or materialization in the actual element of physical time of inner realities. That is, the inner individualistic self forces its vision and knowledge into the world of camouflage pattern, giving its dreams a physical reality denied to the usual dream. And here the use of energy for this purpose is conscious, that is the strong hidden self actually makes use of the camouflage conscious self and molds the two into a reality that combines two planes. This I hope will become clear as you read it over.

The act of artistic creation is therefore one to study, since it involves the intricate workings of the dual self-consciousnesses of one personality, inner data being transformed through the subconscious and greater individuality being made possible because of this.

You were quite correct, Joseph, in your feeling that art created another plane, and now let me hit you with this one: that the paintings of an artist to some degree have a consciousness of their own, not imprisoned either by the form itself.

In the last analysis the channel for vitality or for vitality’s transformation into physical matter is of course the inner senses’ ability, and there is a counteraction here as far as the conscious ego is concerned. The conscious ego often blocks much energy. In dreams the blocking is minimized.

The inner senses operate on all planes and under all circumstances. The outer senses vary according to plane and circumstance. The outer senses are dependable only in terms of the definite plane for which they were constructed. Their purpose of course is to enable the conscious personality to recognize as valid camouflage patterns which are only valid under certain conditions.

(Here Jane laughed. And here again, she proceeded to immediately answer the question that came to my mind.)

Art creations represent such an awareness, but here the creation of another plane must be intertwined with the camouflage pattern with which you are involved. That is, paintings would have no reality in your present stage of development as long as they remained simply in your mind, even to you. You are driven to give them “reality,” and put that word in quotes, through materializing them in terms of camouflage pattern. You do this to the best of your ability, but in order for the painting to have a reality in your world it must be materialized to some degree on the physical plane.

Art creation is a most basic creation then, not even a mimicking act but a genuine creation of another plane, done self-consciously from the perspective of an imprisoning camouflage pattern. Quite an achievement, therefore. It should be simple as an analogy to consider the next point, where the figure in a painting would not only have a certain consciousness for example but would have other freedoms also; and this would give you a limited conception of what is involved in the creation of other planes of more varied scope.

(And however loose the fit, I can state here that Miss Callahan was the subject or question I had in mind and wanted to know about.

I intend to go into more material about various planes, and soon to give a comprehensive view of the inner senses and their mechanism and operation. If this is not too much for you I will add this: that the inner senses would correspond to the outer senses of the inner hidden self-conscious self, that is, separated by the subconscious from your ordinary conscious self.

This hidden self-consciousness can also at times look out through your outer senses upon your camouflage world. At these times you get something of the same effect as when you look through a telescope, and you may think of the long tube of the telescope as the channel of the subconscious.

Incidentally again, when I mentioned that paintings also experienced a certain consciousness I meant to add that they are not completely powerless even on your own plane, since they do exist in it. Naturally they can exert influence in it. I thought this would interest you in particular, Joseph.