“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A particular consciousness is a gestalt of these conceptual patterns; but there is nothing to prevent a consciousness from increasing itself by experiencing other conceptual patterns or patterns of perception. This assimilation would increase, not decrease, any given consciousness. [...] We therefore say that a consciousness is a gestalt of patterns of perception, by which action knows itself. But the patterns of perceptions may grow, and the consciousness reach out. The consciousness has changed. It is no longer the same consciousness, since it has extended itself. Yet it is the same consciousness, on the other hand, because it is that which has extended itself. [...]

[...] All types of consciousness represent a different focus of energy’s perception within itself. [...] Identities, some identities and some forms of consciousness, particularly the ego, perceive a past or a present, but this is merely the result of the manner in which such identities and consciousnesses view available data.

A consciousness can be said to be a gestalt of patterns of perception then; and while the definition stands, it can only apply to any given consciousness for the breath of an instant, since the patterns of perception, being action, have already changed; and the particular consciousness of which we spoke, and which we tried to limit and pin down, is gone.

Consciousness has a feel the same way that a body does. [...] Consciousness isn’t solid, airy, distant thing that you just see through. [...] Usually we just flash our consciousness in one direction and say this is real, but in this experiment at least, let us flash that light down that pyramid in whatever direction we choose. [...]

[...] Realize, as best as you can individually, that you are not your consciousness. Your consciousness is yours for you to use. [...] Your consciousness is merely one more of your abilities. [...]

[...] I really believe, and most of the people in the class do, that there are dimensions of consciousness that are open to us if we only try. [...] And that this particular journey of consciousness, we are leaving ourselves completely open to experience to whatever happens without making any demands or suggestions. [...]

Again, when you are in a state that is not the normal waking one, when you have forsaken this daily self, you are nevertheless conscious and alert. [...] So when the attributes of consciousness are given, creativity is largely ignored. [...] My point is that the unconscious is conscious. Creativity is one of the most important attributes and aspects of consciousness. We will differentiate between normal ego consciousness then, and consciousness that only appears unconscious to that ego. [...]

The conscious ego rises indeed out of quote “the unconscious,” but the unconscious being the creator of the ego, is necessarily far more conscious than its offspring. The ego is simply not conscious enough to be able to contain the vast knowledge that belongs to the inner conscious self from which it springs. [...]

Throughout the ages some have recognized the fact that there is self-consciousness and purpose in certain dream and sleep states, and have maintained, even in waking life, the sense of continuity of this inner self. To such people it is no longer possible to identify completely with the ego consciousness. [...] When such knowledge is gained, the ego can accept it, for it finds to its surprise that it is not less conscious, but more conscious, that its limitations are dissipated; now it is not true, and I emphasize this strongly, that so-called unconscious material, given any freedom, will draw energy away from the egotistically organized self in a normal personality.

[...] Some psychological difficulties need clear conscious light and understanding. Others, however, operate even without conscious participation, and those are often solved, or remedied, at the same level without interfering with the conscious mind. As the body handles many physical manipulations without your own conscious knowledge of what is being done, or how, so the workings of your own psychological systems often automatically solve “their own problems” through dreams of which you are not aware.

The conscious mind, however, can only hold so much. Life as you know it could not exist if everything was conscious in those terms. [...] You can make great strides by understanding and recalling dreams, and by consciously participating in them to a far greater degree. [...]

[...] This does not mean that any of those people could bear consciously knowing their own decisions — or could board that plane with the conscious consequences in mind.

First sentence: Your reality exists independently of your physically oriented consciousness, but while you are a creature your awareness must be interpreted through your neurological structure and your corporeal aliveness. [...] Other data will seldom be required consciously, yet it must always be available to unconscious portions of the self. Biologically the reach and capacity of your physically oriented consciousness is directly connected with the length of your days and nights, and of course with the seasons. [...] With the precise night and day schedule that it possesses, your planet would, in those terms, give birth to a creature consciousness uniquely suited to fit it. In other terms, the night and day represent the innate rhythms of your consciousness physically materialized through natural phenomena, for you are not yet equipped to perceive longer-duration days. [...]

(10:44.) The rhythms of your body and of your consciousness follow the patterns of your planet. The planet itself is composed of atoms and molecules, each with their own kind of consciousness, however; and in the gestalt and cumulative cooperative organization of their nature the physical structure is formed — out of consciousness.

(Pause at 11:38.) You do not need a self-conscious mind to feel, and in the “past,” earthquakes represented the feeling-patterns of species in the same way — unstable conditions of consciousness that in themselves initiated natural phenomena, further altering the state of consciousness and the conditions of species as well.

New paragraph: Consciousness then is not dependent upon physical perception, though this attribute does require an awareness immersed within a material form. While physical consciousness is sifted through the bodily apparatus, you are usually unaware of noncorporeal kinds because of that process. [...] It may seem to you that you do not have any conscious control over your body’s condition in life as you know it, much less before your birth. [...]

Now it is here that the seeming division in the self occurs, for in physical life the conscious mind must be connected with the brain, and in terms of time that organ itself must grow and develop. So all of your consciousness cannot be physically aware. The portion that must “wait for” the brain’s development is the part you call in life “the conscious mind.”

[...] The interior workings of the body, to be conscious, would have to deal with time sequences that would present the physically attuned consciousness with “mathematical” deductions and calculations far too numerous for it to handle. For example, it would have to keep conscious track of all the muscles, nerves, organs, cells, molecules and atoms, while manipulating the body in space and time.

[...] The molecules and atoms and even smaller particles, all contain their separate consciousness. [...] Now, although the cells maintain individuality and do not lose any of their abilities, in this formation into cells there is actually a pooling of individual consciousness of atoms and molecules into, and to form, an individual cellular consciousness. Here the consciousness of each individual molecule or atom, by this psychic gestalt, gains immeasurably. The combination of individual consciousness into a combination forms a new, enlarged, more powerful cellular consciousness that is capable of much more experience and fulfillment than would be possible for the isolated atom or molecule.

The physical body is therefore an attribute of consciousness. The atoms and molecules possess a self-consciousness to some degree, as well as a generalized consciousness. [...] The generalized consciousness which you call the subconscious, is composed of the combination of generalized consciousness from the individual cells and molecules, but now we come down to the source of the self-aware conscious individual behind or within each molecule. [...]

It would seem, therefore, that what you call consciousness might be the result of this combination. That is, it would seem that self-consciousness was the result of this combination. Each cell, however, has its own consciousness, and when I speak of consciousness as being an attribute of cellular life, I speak only for convenience, since actually cellular life is an attribute of consciousness.

Now imagine another adjacent road or line parallel and still further away from your normal consciousness. Now pause to feel the difference in your consciousness as you move from one line or road to another. [...]

[...] Examine the feel of your consciousness as you do so. Move now, further on this time, to another path or road that you will call A-IV, and that is still further in distance from your normal consciousness. [...]

[...] Go up this step again and notice the changes in the feel of yourself and of your consciousness. [...] Step up this one, noticing again any change in the feel of yourself or in your consciousness. [...]

There is a consciousness within the atoms and molecules that compose the body. There is also a group consciousness that is made up. [...] You may call it a nature consciousness. [...] It is the overall consciousness composed of the atoms and molecules within the physical structure and when the main personality has gone its way, this simple consciousness may persist for some time. [...] In many instances, however, this simple consciousness will be retained for some time, in your terms. [...] It is this consciousness that is the simple source of your physical apparatus. It is this consciousness that has been formed particularly within your system from each cell. The individual consciousness of it will withdraw from each atom and molecule within the physical body. Each minute consciousness will withdraw. [...]

[...] They will in turn inhabit other forms, and even the most minute consciousness that resides within the smallest portion of matter, even that consciousness can grow and mature and change, for there is no limitation set upon consciousness. Even then, the smallest consciousness within its own terms of value fulfillment can emerge, can change, can alter, can develop. [...]

[...] The inner self is aware, but the conscious self is not aware. [...] You are a part of these encircling realities and your dreams and thoughts and wishes affect those realities even though you are not consciously aware of this. [...]

The conscious mind can, for instance, see a rose as a symbol of life or death, or joy or sadness, and under certain conditions its interpretation of a simple flower can trigger deep experiences that call up power and strength from the inner resources of being. Since the attributes of egotistical consciousness have been so misinterpreted, you usually consider it only in its analytical breaking-down functions. [...] But the conscious mind is also a great synthesizer. [...]

[...] I told you earlier (in the 614th session in Chapter Two, for instance) that your feelings follow the flow of your beliefs, and if this does not seem true to you it is because you are not aware of the contents of your conscious mind. [...] You can close the eyes of your conscious mind also, and pretend not to see what is there. It is because you do not trust your own basic therapeutic nature, or really understand the conscious or unconscious mind, that you run to so many therapies that originate from without the self.

In man, conscious thoughts are highly important as the directors of unconscious activity. [...] This gives you both a conscious and unconscious feedback system against which to test your experience and alter its nature.

[...] Such identities represent the combined organizations of consciousness of land, man, and animal, within any given realm. Simply enough put, there are as many kinds of consciousnesses as there are particles, and these are combined in infinite fashions. (Long pause.) In the dream state some of that experience, otherwise closed to you, forms the background of the dream drama (A one-minute pause.) Your consciousness is not one thing like a flashlight, that you possess. It is instead a literally endless conglomeration of points of consciousness, swarming together to form your validity — stamped, as it were, with your identity.

[...] Your particular kind of consciousness is the result of specialized focus within a particular area. [...] It is, instead, a certain kind of organization that is indeed inviolate even while it is itself a portion of other kinds of consciousnesses, with their own points of focus. Your body itself is composed of self-aware organizations of consciousness that escape your notice and deal with perceptual material utterly alien to your own ways.

[...] Data gained through waking learning endeavor and experience are checked in dreaming, not only against physical experience, but are also processed according to those “biological” and “spiritual” data, colon: Again, that information is acquired as the sleeping consciousness disperses itself, in a manner of speaking, and merges with other consciousnesses of its own and other species while still retaining its overall identity. These [other consciousnesses] are dispersed in like manner.

If you do not understand that in periods of sleep your consciousness actually does leave your body, then what I have said will be meaningless. Now your consciousness does return at times, to check upon the physical mechanisms, and the simple consciousness of atom and cell — the body consciousness — is always with the body, so it is not vacant. [...]

[...] Consciousness has been away from the body for too long a period, and such a returning consciousness then has difficulty dealing with the sick body mechanism. [...] In many cases it is too great a strain on the part of the returning consciousness to take over again the ailing mechanism.

As a result of more frequent, briefer sleep periods, there would also be higher peaks of conscious focus, and a more steady renewal of both physical and psychic activity. [...] Consciousness as you know it would also become more flexible and mobile.

Your consciousness expands and develops according to its own abilities. Previous lives are handled in conscious terms when you are in existence between physical lives. When you are completed in those terms you may operate within a two-reality field psychological pattern, in which you are consciously aware of existing in two systems at once, and able to manipulate with full awareness within each.

[...] The trace image is not his consciousness however. His consciousness is aware of the trace image, and on occasion can utilize it.

[...] Consciously you deal with those problems of one given physical life. Consciously you are not aware of what you call reincarnations, though these occur within your own system. [...]

The qualities of consciousness cannot be elucidated. These exercises will bring you in contact with other kinds of knowing, and acquaint you with different feelings of consciousness that are not familiar. Your consciousness itself will then have a different feel as the exercises are done. [...] The different modes of consciousness with which I hope to acquaint you are not alien, however. [...]

[...] There is nothing wrong with the conscious mind. You have simply put a lid on it, allowing it to be only so conscious, and no more. You have said: “Here it is safe to be conscious, and here it is not.”

[...] You are not consciously aware of such data, however. [...] Often, however, your own stream of consciousness leads you to think of events outside of their usual order. [...]

[...] No consciousness, to whatever degree, is fully manifested in matter. There is always constant communication between all portions of the body, but when the conscious mind is diverted that activity often increases. Cellular consciousness at its own level then forms a body dream. These do not involve pictures or words, but are rather like the formations of electromagnetic intent, anticipating action to be taken, and these may then serve as initiators of therapeutic dreams, in which “higher” levels of consciousness are psychologically made aware of certain conditions.

There are too many varieties of such dreams to discuss here, but they all involve consciousness dispersing, yet retaining its identity, consciousness making loops with itself. [...] They hint at the true dimensions of consciousness that are usually unavailable to you, for you actually form your own historical world in the same manner, in that above all other experiences that one world is predominant, and played on the screen of your brain.

This is most difficult to explain, but the capacity for full conscious life is inherent in each portion of the body itself. [...] The brain has abilities you do not use consciously because your beliefs prevent you from initiating the proper neural habits. [...]

A man, wondering what a tree was like, became one, and let his own consciousness flow into the tree. Man’s consciousness mixed and merged with other kinds of consciousness with the great curiosity of love. A child did not simply look at an animal, but let its consciousness merge with the animal’s, and so to some extent the animal looked out through the child’s eyes.

Your own kind of focus emerged from such a background, so that within yourselves you contain myriad consciousnesses of which you are unaware. Through your own particular focus, the consciousnesses of the natural world merged to form a synthesis in which, for example, symphonies can emerge. You act not only for yourselves, but also for other kinds of consciousness that you have purposefully forgotten. [...]

You will have to give us time… (Pause, one of many.) When a man’s consciousness, for example, blended with that of a tree, those data became “visual” for others to perceive. When a man’s consciousness merged with an animal’s, that blending became visual data also.

The so-called stream of consciousness is simply that — one small stream of thoughts, images, and impressions — that is part of a much deeper river of consciousness that represents your own far greater existence and experience. [...] Simultaneously these other streams of perception and consciousness go by without your notice, yet they are very much a part of you, and they represent quite valid aspects, events, actions, emotions with which you are also involved in other layers of reality.

“You” are not divorced from these other streams of consciousness in any basic way; only your focus of attention closes you off from them, and from the events in which they are involved. If you think of your stream of consciousness as transparent, however, then you can learn to look through and beneath it to others that lie in other beds of reality. You can also learn to rise above your present stream of consciousness and perceive others that run, for analogy’s sake, parallel. [...]

[...] Now, as you are merely concerned with your physical body and physical self as a rule, you give your attention to the stream of consciousness that seems to deal with it. These other streams of consciousness, however, are connected with other self-forms that you do not perceive. [...]

[...] The form was there, but it was not manifest (intently). I do not particularly like the analogy, but it is useful: Instead of small particles (long pause), you had small units of consciousness gradually building themselves into large ones—but a smaller unit of consciousness, you see, is not “less than” a larger unit, for each unit of consciousness contains within itself the innate (underlined) heritage of All That Is.

Electrons in your terms are precognitive, and so is your cellular consciousness. [...] (Pause.) The cell’s stability, and its reliability in the bodily environment, is dependent upon its innate properties of instant communication and instant decision, for each cell is in communication with all others and is united with all others through fields of consciousness,³ in which each entity of whatever degree plays a part.

You think of the conscious mind, as you know it, as the only kind of consciousness with a deliberate intent, awareness of itself as itself, and with a capacity for logic and the appreciation of symbolism. [...]

[...] Your living room reaches out horizontally in space as far as your consciousness is concerned. [...] This means that consciousness must, and is, learning new manipulations. [...]

[...] The private consciousness is forced to contend with world events in a way that is completely new in historical terms. It is a time of turmoil—but it is a time of turmoil partially because consciousness has been willing to extend itself in that particular fashion. [...]

That picture, however, provides a kind of exaggeration, throwing back a mirror to the official line of consciousness that it must find most distasteful. Such communications, however, in the overall have great potential, for even unwillingly they stress the unity of the planet—and consciousness itself strains to solve problems on a different basis than before. [...]

When consciousness is being specified, it always sees itself at the center of its world. All specifications of consciousness and all phenomenal appearances occur when the basic units of consciousness, the CU’s, emerge into EE units, and hence into the dimensions of actuality in your terms. Your mainly accepted normal consciousness is within the matter of your body, and through it — the body — you view your world. There is nothing to prevent you from viewing your body from a standpoint outside of it, except that you have been taught that consciousness is imprisoned within the flesh.

[...] Wait — just now as I wrote this I picked up something [from a part of my consciousness other than Ruburt or Seth], to the effect that the projection environment is as focused as mine is, really, but that it’s a probability of mine. Biologically I wasn’t keyed into it in my ‘now’, I was in it and not in it, between focused realities … traveling in or through these fluctuations of consciousness Seth talked about in the last session. He mentioned probable kinds of consciousness in that session, too. [...]

While inhabited by the usual human consciousness, the living body operates as an intense focus point. The conglomeration of consciousnesses within it on all levels focuses its own network of communication. [...] Not only can all cells respond to each other, but their mass activity triggers even higher centers of consciousness to respond to a given set of world conditions, rather than to other quite-as-legitimate world conditions that do not fit the accepted pattern. [...]