“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Matter is continually created, but no particular physical object is in itself continuous. Change in a particular physical object is not change as you conceive it. There is not, for example, one particular physical object that deteriorates with age. There are instead continuous, for now I will say continuous creations, of psychic energy into a physical pattern that appears to hold a more or less rigid appearance. This appearance appears, that is, this physical object appears to change and to age, but the material does neither. It does not exist long enough to do either, for one thing. There is an infinite number or series of creations of matter. The ability of the individual creator of any particular physical form to use psychic energy to control and manipulate causes the outer appearance of deterioration and aging of matter.

Any material object is being constantly recreated, according to a form that may appear rigid and fairly permanent. It is however the passing through of individualized, highly specialized psychic personality patterns. It is the passing through of these personality patterns, within a certain field of organization that causes the appearance of both fairly rigid material which then seems to change.

Again, no particular material object exists long enough, as an indivisible or rigid or identical thing, to change or age. The energy behind it weakens. The physical pattern therefore blurs. Each re-creation after a certain point becomes from your standpoint, less perfect; and after many such complete re-creations, that have been completely unperceived by you, then you notice a difference and assume that a change in one object has occurred.

The actual material that seems to make up the object has completely disappeared many times, and the pattern been completely filled again with new matter.

No particular physical particle exists for any amount of time. It exists and disappears, and is instantaneously replaced by another. The third actual property of matter is what I will call pattern assumption. It assumes and flows within patterns.

The existence of the patterns gives the illusion of a permanence of matter that is highly misleading. There is so much to be said here, as it is also necessary to consider the ways in which physical material is constantly created, and to consider the role of the senses.

This may seem like a sideline but it is not. In the painting of a picture, you are actually forming new patterns through which energy can flow into material form. There are reasons, which I will discuss later, why the painting, that is the physical pattern of a painting, may seem to, and often does, exist longer than the man who paints it.

No particular physical particle has any kind of durability. It constantly vanishes as such, and is replaced. The pattern which is filled by physical matter is composed of, of course, psychic energy; and it continues like an afterimage, seeming to become weaker, as indeed it does, as it or the energy behind it passes beyond the field in which matter as you think of it is effective. Growth in living things, perceived as living organisms, does not involve the extension of a particular physical thing.

Intellectually for example, he will not be tempted to block me. The seed is not the flower, and the flower is not the fruit. The fruit is not the result of changes in the seed. In each case there are patterns to be filled. The pattern contains the material—change that to data—for the physical material to follow. When you consider this information in connection with an inner psychic reality, then you will see its supreme logic.

When you consider that behind all matter there is a conscious energy, then you will see where the pattern comes from. It is not the material that composes man, that gives him his identity. No physical nerve structure, or combination of purely chemical and material properties, will ever result in consciousness. The consciousness gives meaning to the physical material.