“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In actuality the outer layer of skin is a flimsy boundary indeed. It is more open than closed. It is only to your own outer senses that the skin seems smooth. It is indeed more a loose open framework, through which constantly chemicals, nutrients, molecules, elements, light, sound and pulsations pass frequently, constantly both in and out.

As many quite real phenomena cannot be seen by your eyes, so with your outer senses you cannot perceive these constant departures of quality-energy from the self into what seems to be notself. These energies, these thoughts and wishes, travel. They pass through physical matter.

The one stability between self and what is notself, and the one and only difference, is not an identity that is part and parcel of constantly changing physical framework, not the outer ego whose conception of who it is constantly changes, according to its age and environment, but the inner self behind all physical constructions.

Now, you should see from this that your universe is therefore itself a gestalt. As an individual cell can be considered to be apart from the rest of the body, as its outer rim can be considered as something that divides it from the rest of the body, so the self can be considered as apart from the universe, and its outer skin thought of as dividing it from the rest of the body.

However, as we know the cell is a part of the body, giving nourishment and receiving nourishment from it. Its outer rim, more correctly, connects it to the body. Parts of it literally travel throughout the body. It is yet an individual. It possesses condensed consciousness and comprehension, it partakes of value fulfillments through the gestalt of which it would not otherwise be capable. If you considered the body as a closed system, which it is not, then you could say that the self of the cell had as its limitations only the limits of the whole closed system. But the system is not closed, and through the participation of the cell in the activities of the body, which is an open system, then you could truly say that the cell itself had no limitations.