“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Alphabets can hardly hope to give you more than, if you will forgive me (humorously) lip services to these. Each symbol in an alphabet stands for therefore unutterable symbols beneath it. Now the human voice, as singers know, can be used to express far more qualities of feeling than the normal unadorned speaking voice. Sound itself, even without recognizable words, carries meaning. Oddly enough, sometimes the given meaning of a word does battle with the psychic and physical meaning of the sounds that compose it.

In quite different terms however it is a language that is at the base of all languages, and from which all languages spring in your terms. Alphabets do not change, or you would consider them relatively useless. Cordellas, as I told you, do change. Alphabets are the physical aspect of cordellas. One very small aspect of a cordella is sized upon and (in quotes) “frozen,” so to speak, its ordinary motion and the rhythm of its changes therefore unrecognized. (Long pause at 11 PM.)

It builds up from feelings that are by their nature denied clear expression through the specific but therefore limiting alphabet systems. (Pause at 11:06.) It allows the perceiver to face experience much more closely, and once having done this to some extent he is free in other areas also. If you were an accomplished artist in many fields, you could translate a given feeling into a painting. A poem, a musical masterpiece, a sculpture, a novel, an opera, into a great piece of architecture. You would be able to perceive and feel the experience with greater dimension, for your expression would not be limited to translating it automatically, without choice, into any one specific area. Its dimensions would be greater to you then. So a cordella as opposed to an alphabet opens up greater varieties of experience and expression.

(Long pause at 10:24.) Cordellas are invisible symbols that surface. As they surface they show the universe in a new light by the very nature of their relationships. In a very limited fashion alphabets do the same thing, for once you have accepted certain basic verbal symbols they impose their discipline even upon your thoughts, obviously since you think in words so often.

[...] These inner languages are built up as cordellas, and cordellas are psychic organizational units from which, then, all alphabets are born. Alphabets imply cordellas, but cannot contain them, any more than English can contain Russian, French, Chinese, or any combination. [...]

Your physical senses, again, act almost like a biological alphabet, allowing you to organize and perceive certain kinds of information from which you form the events of your world and the contours of your reality.

[...] These are based upon the sensual alphabet, which itself emerges from nonsensual cordellas. [...]

[...] Your formation of events, however, does not simply reside in your unique psychological properties, of course, but is possible because of the corporal alphabet of the flesh.

[...] The word cordella, now for example, was used instead of alphabet to break your ordinary conceptions of alphabet while conveying an idea of symbols closely allied, and upon which alphabets are based.

Then, and only then, can you project this understanding or insight onto the word alphabet, and sense how the skin does have its own alphabet. The word alphabet itself becomes changed for you. [...]

[...] If I told you that the skin had its own alphabet without what I have already explained, it would not have been nearly as clear. The word cordella, used in the same fashion, frees you from limiting conceptions of what an alphabet is.

[...] In a way the language of love followed molecular roots — a sort of biological alphabet, though “alphabet” is far too limiting a term.

[...] There is a connection between alphabets and the molecular structure that composes your tissue. Alphabets then are natural keys also. [...]

You make sentences out of the alphabet of your language. [...] Events can be considered in the same fashion, as psychological sentences put together from the alphabet of the senses — experienced sentences that are lived instead of written, formed into perceived history instead of just being penned, for example, into a book about history.

[...] All of your written or verbal languages have to be based upon this biological “alphabet.” [...]

[...] The components of that language or the earth elements that form the body were already created when you were born, as the alphabet of your particular language was waiting to be used.

Your very physical life, then, implies a “source,” a life out of which the physical one emerges, dash — the implied, unspoken, unmaterialized, unsounded vitality that supplied the ingredients for the physical, bodily, molecular “alphabet.” [...]

The direct expression through writing confuses him, for he is faced with a different kind of construction, say, than one might feel in a kindergarten, where blocks of wood carry the alphabet, and physical blocks might be moved around to form words. [...]

[...] You are getting into some material where we compare cordellas and alphabets and that material will also tell you why we are interested in using this language at all. [...]

[...] Your being rides upon that unstated reality, as a letter of the alphabet rides upon the inner organizations that are implied by its existence. [...]

[...] She has the laws of the two worlds confused (pause), and it is as if she had use of an entire alphabet, but the letters were not in order, but out of their proper arrangement, so that it was almost impossible to read the sentences, so to speak, that have then resulted. [...]

[...] You can learn from them, as once you piled alphabet blocks together in a stack at school. [...]

[...] If you possibly remember what I said last week, then we will have you dancing through your cordellas, throwing alphabets out of the window to flutter in the wind. [...]

[...] Seth also mentioned other initials: a J and a letter toward the end of the alphabet; this was not definite enough.

[...] But using these models gave the alphabets some kind of standardization.⁵

yet forms new alphabets of life

[...] You translate what they say into words, but the inner knowledge within you exists long before any alphabet was ever known. [...]

[...] The language of the psyche, however, has at its command many more symbols that can be combined in many more ways, say, than mere letters of an alphabet.

[...] It began to move almost at once, and by tapping out the alphabet told me, in somewhat garbled fashion, that an O B, a family relative, was making contact. [...]

[...] But it is sometimes almost impossible to verbally describe civilizations of scent, civilizations built upon temperature variations, alphabets of color, pressure gradations — all of these highly intimate and organized, but quite outside of verbal representation. [...]

[...] There is a pattern of sound beneath all languages, a bed of vocal communication that lies behind all language and alphabet. [...]