“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Matter is in some ways the basis of your universe, and yet matter itself is merely energy changed into aspects with certain properties that can, under certain conditions, be perceived by your senses, and that can therefore be manipulated.

In itself matter is not continuous. What you perceive as change or growth in a living physical structure is not change or growth as you conceive it. The physical properties of matter are not continuous, in that a particular given tree or rock is not at all the same tree or rock, physically, today that it was yesterday. Nor will it be the same tomorrow. The chair upon which you sit this evening is not the same chair, physically speaking, that it was last evening.

The matter is spontaneously and instantaneously created. As you know, or should know, this applies to the human physical form as well as to all other material. You are seeing in slow motion when you think you see growth and decay as being properties of matter.

Again, growth and deterioration are what I will call apparencies. They are, in other words, only apparent properties of physical material. Physical material has in actuality two main properties. It is spontaneous and instantaneous.

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.

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.