“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 use, or you use, words merely as a convenience. 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. So words can confuse us.

The self then, being action which has formed itself into gestalts of pattern perceptions, by which it knows itself, this self changes constantly. And within the range of effective perception, starting at any particular point, there are patterns within patterns. For convenience’s sake we will have to limit our discussion to some degree, taking the self as a particular gestalt within, or composed of, a particular range of perception patterns; though in actuality the range may be smaller or larger at any given time.

There is no one particular pattern followed by consciousness in its perception of itself as action. Mankind is more familiar with certain patterns and relatively unfamiliar with others. Any action changes itself. Nothing is constant. This rule is not forced upon action from some outside agency, but is simply a part of its own nature.

An ego could be compared to a small dam in this respect. However, action constantly forms perceptual patterns in which it can view itself. Again, these patterns are formed one within the other, and they could be said to form that imaginary structure which we called the fifth dimension, so many sessions ago.

The rejected action patterns, however, will find outlet. The nature of the outlet will be the result of the nature of the particular patterns themselves. The quality of the outlet will depend upon the intensity of these patterns, and the necessity or the degree of necessity, for their expression. Unless some adjustments are made at this point, the ego will have nothing to say with the direction that these patterns may take, simply because it will not accept their legitimacy.

It feels the concentration of energy that has collected to form the rejected action patterns, and indeed it may feel that this unified rejection pattern is then even an enemy to its own superiority. [...]

[...] The child therefore within the adult personality is not dead, nor are his reactions considered, basically, as reactions which are part of a past behavior pattern; but these reactions exist side by side with adult reactions.

[...] The ego’s denial of a reaction however does not cause the reaction to disappear from within the personality, at least as part of possible pattern reaction.

These sound values are literally interwoven in an electromagnetic pattern. The sounds weave (gesturing) themselves through, and help form this pattern. [...] (Long pause.) The electromagnetic and inner sound patterns are impinged upon by certain kinds of light. [...]

By the time the organism responds the inner patterns have already reacted, and this must and always does precede any physical response to stimuli. Therefore the invisible body pattern, composed of its interior light, sound and electromagnetic properties, reacts first, and actually initiates the later physical response.

[...] These activate the interior patterns. [...] They are energy formed and directed, formulations of interior and exterior patterns of reality. [...]

[...] A mental image then is also a pattern of internal sound with electromagnetic properties imbued with certain light values. [...]

[...] Your camouflage patterns can be likened to those cast by sun and shadow upon the ever-moving waves. As long as you keep the pattern in mind, you create it, and it is there. [...] Only by turning your head aside momentarily can you see what is beneath the seemingly solid pattern. [...]

Concentrating upon your own camouflage universe, you are able to distinguish only the distortive pattern, and from this pattern you deduce your ideas of cause and effect, past, present and future, and ideas of an expanding universe that floats …

[...] The inner senses inhabit directly the atmosphere of our value climate; they see through the ever-varying camouflage (physical) patterns, and the flux and flow of apparent change. [...]

Yet even these camouflage patterns must follow the basic rules of the inner universe, and reflect them, even if in a distortive manner. [...]

Now, you can change this by changing the pattern of your thoughts. Not only do you attract like patterns when you are awake, but when you are asleep, so a vicious, vicious pattern is set up when you are negative. Your negative dreams, therefore, reinforce the waking pattern. [...] If, however, your conscious thought patterns are positive, then your dream patterns will also be the same. [...]

[...] Now, your thoughts create patterns in dimensions that you do not perceive. You become habitually able to think in certain patterns more than other patterns. [...] This not only happens in the waking state, but you also become more open in the dreaming state to telepathic communications from others of a negative pattern. [...]

[...] Thought patterns and emotional patterns, left alone, would change one into the other as stormy weather changes into sunny. It is only when strong negative patterns are allowed to flow unrestrained and indulged in so that they become a barrier holding back positive thoughts that you run into difficulty. [...] There is no one else that has control over your own thought patterns and you would be very upset, indeed, if anyone else did. [...]

(To Brad:) Now, your conscious thought patterns and your subconscious thought patterns are the same. Therefore, using your inner senses that day you felt the urge to get into your car because consciously you were looking for negative patterns. [...]

The physical body is a camouflage pattern operating in a larger camouflage pattern. But the physical body and all camouflage patterns, looked at in another manner, are also transformers of the vital inner stuff of the universe, where this vitality is then enabled to operate under new and various conditions.

Camouflage patterns are bad enough to deal with from my end, but personal camouflage patterns thrown up by the brain are worse. As far as your neurotics are concerned—for some reason speaking of the affairs usually called seances reminded me of neurotics—as far as neurotics are concerned, this neuroticism is part and parcel of an inadequacy on the part of the physical body and the personality both, that involves an inability to handle camouflage patterns.

As I have said, the outer senses deal mainly and as far as I know exclusively with camouflage pattern. The inner senses, my dear Joseph, are senses which deal with realities beneath camouflage patterns, and which carry data of these realities, these inner realities, to the body. [...]

[...] Any material that is important for the body’s contact with outer camouflage patterns is given to the brain. [...] Portions of it do deal with camouflage patterns, with the personal past of the present personality, with racial camouflage memories; and the greater portion belongs to the inner world, and as data comes into it from the inner world, so can it reach far into the inner world itself.

[...] But the growth, so-called, is not of itself a property of matter, in that the same matter does not grow, but energy completely forms the pattern ever anew, as far as the particular strength of the energy itself can carry it, and knowing the limitations and capacities of the pattern which it has formed. To some extent the image or physical pattern ultimately blurs.

[...] No one atom or molecule within the fetus will exist within the adult, and yet the bits of energy that have formed together to form the pattern of the fetus know the capacity and limits of their own nature, and know therefore the potentialities and limits of the pattern which they have made.

Also, for reasons that I will for now withhold, the psychic patterns within your physical universe are not maintained, as you know, indefinitely. [...] But psychic gestalts develop in terms of value fulfillment, and it is known at the first appearance of a physical pattern how long the particular to-be-built-up gestalt will be maintained.

Energy itself is continually new—event, and motion, and no particular pattern will suffice it for long. Energy is self-renewing, and indefinite duration of pattern would lead to dead ends. [...]

A kind of inverted beta pattern, difficult to describe, often appears suddenly in the midst of the other ranges, driving through them, accelerating consciousness to a high degree of creativity. The brain waves as they are known are separately registered segments of a greater “whole” kind of consciousness, and your machines are just as segmented, perceiving only those patterns [they were designed to recognize]. [...] They cannot note the rapidity with which you move through all of the known patterns constantly. [...]

[...] The normal waking consciousness, with its characteristic patterns, can indeed follow [into sleep]. [...] You would follow your own pattern of continuity and understanding, weaving this into the sleep and dream states, forming a “new” pattern that triumphantly combines all, as to some extent this occurs in our sessions.

[...] The other patterns (delta, theta, and alpha) are highly important to physical and mental stability, being very interwound with cellular consciousness. [...]

It is possible, then, for a brain to register all of the known patterns at once, though your machines would note only the predominating rhythm.

[...] 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.

[...] The third actual property of matter is what I will call pattern assumption. It assumes and flows within patterns.

[...] 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.

[...] In each case there are patterns to be filled. The pattern contains the material—change that to data—for the physical material to follow. [...]

You are forced to transform this creative energy into another camouflage pattern because of your earthly situation. [...] Then you transform it into a somewhat different, more evocative, new camouflage pattern that is, nevertheless, more fluent, more fluid than the usual pattern, and gives greater freedom and mobility to the vitality itself. [...]

The physical body is a camouflage pattern operating in a larger camouflage pattern. But the body and all camouflage patterns are also transformers of the vital inner stuff of the universe, enabling it to operate under new and various conditions.

The brain deals exclusively with camouflage patterns, while the mind deals with basic principles inherent on all planes. The brain is, itself, part of the camouflage pattern and can be interpreted and probed by physical instruments. [...]

The outer senses deal mainly with camouflage patterns. [...] As the senses of sight, sound and smell appear to reach outward, bringing data to the body from an outside observable camouflage pattern, so the inside senses seem to extend far inward, bringing inner reality data to the body. [...]

The physical world that you recognize is made up of invisible patterns. These patterns are “plastic,” in that while they exist, their final form is a matter of probabilities directed by consciousness. Your senses perceive these patterns in their own ways. The patterns themselves can be “activated” in innumerable fashions. [...]

[...] The sculptor’s statue, however, comes from the inner environment, the patterns of probabilities. These patterns are not themselves inactive. [...]

[...] They are political patterns, invisible but highly effective. There are, however, far more vigorous invisible mental patterns, into which the thoughts and feelings of mankind are organized — or, naturally, organize themselves.

[...] Again, the very senses that make such a deduction are the result of the behavior of atoms and molecules literally coming together to form the organs, filling a pattern of flesh. [...]

[...] When you are conceived, there is already a complete pattern for your grown physical body — a pattern that is definite enough to give you the recognizable kind of adult form, while variable enough to allow for literally infinite variations (very intently).

In your terms again, then, at any one earth time many such patterns exist. In greater respects however, all time is simultaneous, and so all such physical patterns exist at once.

The private psyche, the part of you that you do not recognize, is aware of those patterns even as it is aware of private physical biological patterns about which it forms your image. [...]

[...] In regular life, you organize your experience very neatly and push it into accepted patterns or channels, into preconceived ideas and beliefs. [...]

[...] The physical patterns are of course the results of inner ones, but the deliberate breaking of a physical pattern serves as a physical example that those patterns can indeed be broken, and helps break the exterior hypnotizing effects of continued repetitious action of a given kind.

[...] He struggled, for example, against the old ingrained pattern, to get himself up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, or to stop what he was doing in the day, to go every hour, yet he did so. [...]

[...] Ruburt moves about faster at night because the patterned behavior of the day is not present.

[...] If it will help you, think of the energy as a wind, a cosmic wind that fills up from the inside, certain patterns. The filled-up patterns appear fairly rigid and permanent enough to be counted upon as such. [...] It comes and goes, filling the patterns according to its own intensity.

What you have instead is constant, new creation of material, as energy fills the patterns. The sharpness or rigidity or quality of the perceived material depends on the energy which forms it, and the characteristics of matter therefore depend upon the position of the energy that fills the pattern; but by position, I think in terms of the arrival and departure of this energy as it passes through your field.

We will take a good amount of time to cover this and allied subjects, as we must also deal with the pattern and its source. [...]

[...] Once this is understood it becomes at least theoretically possible to re-create the material of the past, in so far as the patterns for the material have been retained.

We gave you the pattern by which your physical selves are formed. We gave you the pattern by which you learned to form your physical reality. We gave you the patterns intricate, involved, and blessed from which you form the reality of each physical thing you know. The most minute cell within your brain has been made from the patterns of consciousness, which we have given you. We gave you the pattern upon which you formed your entire physical universe... [...]

You have trained your consciousness to follow certain patterns that are not necessarily natural for it, and these patterns increase the sense of alienation between the waking and dreaming self. [...]

You would retain a far greater memory of your subjective experiences, and your body would be healthier, if these sleeping patterns were changed. Six to eight hours of sleep in all would be sufficient with the nap patterns outlined. [...]

Changing the sleep patterns would automatically change the eating patterns. [...]

(Since this session — it is June 1 as I type this — Jane and I have been experimenting somewhat with altered sleep patterns, and we can say that Seth’s ideas seem eminently workable. [...] We supplement this pattern with one or two rest periods during the daylight hours. [...]

Any information or knowledge must have a pattern if you are going to understand it at all. Ruburt’s own painting, his knowledge of his psychic abilities, his love of Joseph — all served to form a pattern which then attracted the Cézanne material. [...] This direct kind of knowledge is available, again, on any subject, to anyone who provides a suitable pattern through desire, love, intent or belief.

[...] Various so-called esoteric traditions provide certain methods that allow an individual to set aside accepted modes of perception, and offer patterns that may be used as containers for these other kinds of knowledge. [...]

[...] As a result, you do not have any culturally acceptable patterns that allow you to use your dreams competently.

[...] A mind is a psychic pattern through which you interpret and form reality. [...]

[...] You must therefore replace negative patterns with positive ones. As you know, the negative patterns bring results. [...]

Remember that your present reality is the result of years of positive and negative thought patterns. [...]

[...] You have many negative patterns to conquer.

[...] Your attitude was a rejecting one in general—that is, it was a reflection of a deeper pattern of negative thinking.

[...] The invisible [vault of] Framework 2 contains endless patterns that change as, say, clouds do — that mix and merge to form your psychological climate. [...] In those terms your thoughts mix and match with others in Framework 2, creating mass patterns that form the overall psychological basis behind world events. [...]

In those terms there is “an ideal” psychological pattern to which you are yourself intimately connected. [...] On the other hand, that pattern is not rigid, but flexible enough to take advantage of changing circumstances, even as a plant will turn toward the sun though you move it from room to room while the sunlight varies its directions. [...]

[...] Such events involve psychological configurations on the part of all those involved, so that the inner individual patterns of those lives touched by each such event have in one way or another a common purpose that at the same time serves the overall reality on a natural planetary basis. [...] Each is also endowed with patterns toward growth and fulfillment — not at the expense of the rest of nature, but to the contrary, so that every other element of nature may also be completed (all with much emphasis).

In Framework 2 thoughts instantly form patterns. [...]

[...] Now, so strong is this tendency for vitality to change from one apparent form to another, that what you have here in your flying object is something that is actually, as you view it, not of your plane or of [whatever] plane of its origin … The atoms and molecules that structurally compose the UFO, and which are themselves formed by vitality, are more or less aligned according to the pattern of its own territory. [...] Its actual structure is caught in a dilemma of form … between transforming itself completely into earth’s particular camouflage pattern, and retaining its original pattern. [...]

[...] Once the inhabitants of a plane have learned mental-science patterns, then they are to a great degree freed from the more regular camouflage [physical] patterns. [...]

[...] A plane is formed for entities as patterns for fulfillment on various levels. [...]