Seth, Breath, and I Am

In an earlier post called "Breath of Life" I quoted a number of spiritual teachers and their comments and statements about how important our breath is. I said, among other things:

Our breath is like an energetic umbilical cord, connecting us, in our human body, with all other realms and dimensions. It’s the direct route to integrating all of our experiences. Consciously breathing reconnects us to who we really are in ways we are only just coming to realize.

In another post, "Of Ego and Essence" I quoted Gina Lake's mentor and channel, Theo, saying:

This that you are—who you truly are—is alive right now. It’s not some concept. “It” is living your life, it’s breathing your body, it’s right here. It gets overshadowed by this manufactured me that the mind speaks about: I’m this, I’m that, I like this, I like that.

This whole identity is created by the mind. It feels real, it seems real, it even has feelings attached to it which makes it more real, but that isn’t who you are. All that mental stuff, it isn’t you.

What is real is this aliveness that is living this life. This awareness that is aware of this life, that is aware of thoughts, that is aware of feelings. You are that awareness. And this awareness is co-creating with itself on other levels.

So that which you are is incarnate. It’s not just a concept of a higher self that’s sitting up there in some other dimension (separate from you). It’s incarnate. It’s here. And when you’re responding naturally and joyfully, that’s it responding, that’s it living. When you’re involved with thought, that’s your ego living you.

So there are two ways of Being in any moment. There is Being aligned with the ego and the mind, and there’s Being aligned with essence. Any moment any of those two things can be happening, but not both of them at the same time. So there’s a dance going on in every moment—people spend time involved in the ego, and they spend time in essence.

The more spiritually progressed you are, the more time you spend identified with your true self rather than the mind. And that’s what awakening is about. It’s a movement toward full identification with essence as it’s living you now.

In reviewing some of my old Seth books, I came upon the following. It's from Jane Roberts' book "Seth, Dreams, and Projections of Consciousness." It was written in the mid-1960s and discusses material from the early sessions. This particular piece was from sessions 22 and 23.

Seth:

Some part of the individual is aware of the most minute portions of breath; some part knows of the most minute particle of oxygen and other components that enter the lungs. The thinking brain does not know. Your all-important ‘I’ does not know. In actuality, my dear friends, the all-important ‘I’ does know. You do not know the all-important ‘I’, and that is your difficulty.

It is fashionable in your time to consider man as the product of the brain and an isolated bit of the subconscious, with a few other odds and ends thrown in for good measure. Therefore, with such an unnatural division, it seems to man that he does not know himself.

He says ‘I breathe, but who breathes, since consciously I cannot tell myself to breathe or not to breathe?’ He says ‘I dream, but who dreams? I cannot tell myself to dream or not to dream.’ He cuts himself in half and then wonders why he is not whole. Man has admitted only those things he could see, smell, touch or hear; and in so doing, he could only appreciate half of himself. And when I say half, I exaggerate; he is aware of only a third of himself.

If man does not know who breathes within him, and if man does not know who dreams within him, it is not because there is one self who acts in the physical universe and another who dreams and breathes. It is because he has buried the part of himself which breathes and dreams. If these functions seem so automatic as to be performed by someone completely divorced from himself, it is because he has done the divorcing.

The part of you who dreams is the ‘I’ as much as the part of you who operates in any other manner. The part of you who dreams is the part of you who breathes. This part of you is certainly as legitimate and necessary to you as a whole unit is, as the part who plays bridge or Scrabble. It would seem ludicrous to suppose that such a vital matter as breathing would be left to a subordinate, almost completely divorced, poor-relative sort of a lesser personality.

As breathing is carried on in a manner that seems automatic to the conscious mind, so the important function of transforming the vitality of the universe into pattern units seems to be carried on automatically. But this transformation is not as apparent to the one part of yourself that you are pleased to recognize, and so it seems as if this transformation is carried on by someone even more distant than your breathing and dreaming selves.

Because you know that you breathe, without being consciously aware of the mechanics involved, you are forced to admit that you do your own breathing. When you cross a room, you are forced to admit that you caused yourself to do so, though consciously you have no idea of willing the muscles to move, or of stimulating one tendon or another. Yet even though you admit these things, you do not really believe them.

In your quiet unguarded moments, you still say, ‘Who breathes? Who dreams? Who moves?’ How much easier it would be to admit, freely and whole-heartedly, the simple fact that you are not consciously aware of vital parts of yourself and that you are more than you think you are.

Man, for example, trusts himself much more when he says ‘I will read,’ and then he reads, than he does when he says, ‘I will see,’ and then he sees. He remembers having learned to read, but he does not remember having learned to see, and what he cannot consciously remember, he fears.

The fact is that although no one taught him to see, he sees. The part of himself that did ‘teach’ him to see still guides his movements, still moves the muscles of his eyes, still becomes conscious despite him when he sleeps, still breathes for him without thanks or recognition, and still carries on his task of transforming energy from an inner reality into an outer one. Man becomes trapped by his own artificially divided self.

It is true, as a rule, that you are not aware of your whole entity. There is no reason, however, why you must be blind to the whole self of your present personality, which is part of the entity, and which can be glimpsed in terms of the breathing and dreaming ‘self’ of which I have spoken.

It is convenient not to be consciously aware of each breath you take, but it is sheer stupidity to ignore the inner self which does the breathing and is aware of the mechanics involved. I have said that the mind is a part of the inner world, but you have access to your own minds, which you ignore; and this access would lead you inevitably to truths about the outer world. Working inward, you could understand the outward more clearly.

When I add all of those up, I come to the striking realization that we are more our Soul Self than we imagine, we just don't remember that we are.

We can come into more and more awareness of our 'true' selves if we choose to, because we really are our 'true' selves, in every sense of the word. We disconnected different pieces of ourselves because we didn't understand, and we can reconnect those pieces anytime we want.

Guess what one of the best ways of reconnecting is? (Besides being in your joy ;)) Breathing consciously!

As you consciously breathe in and out, know that you are reconnecting 'you' with 'You'. Feel the connection. I Am. Appreciate who you've been, who you are, and who you are becoming. I Am. Not only I Am, I always was, and I always will be.

Fully experience that you are already whole, already both sides of the coin of you and You, you just forgot. Now you remember. How exciting is that?