“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. (Pause.) While men had their dream bodies alone they enjoyed a remarkable freedom, of course, for those bodies did not have to be fed or clothed. They did not have to operate under the law of gravity. Men could wander as they wished about the landscape. They did not yet identify themselves to any great degree (underlined) as being themselves separate from either the environment or other creatures. They knew themselves to be themselves, but their identities were not as closely allied with their forms as is now the case.

The dream world was bound to waken, however, for that was the course it had set itself upon. This awakening, again, happened spontaneously, and yet with its own order. In the terms of this discussion the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man’s did. The animals became physically effective, therefore, while to some degree man still lingered in that dream reality.

(With emphasis:) In a matter of speaking (underlined), the birds and the insects are indeed living portions of the earth flying, even as, again in a matter of speaking (in parentheses) (with a smile and again with an emphasis upon the word “matter”), bears and wolves and cows and cats represent the earth turning itself into creatures that live upon its own surface. And in a matter of speaking, again, man becomes the earth thinking, and thinking his own thoughts, man in his way specializes in the conscious work of the world—a work that is dependent upon the indispensable “unconscious” work of the rest of nature, a nature that sustains him (all very intently). And when he thinks, man thinks for the microbes, for the atoms and the molecules, for the smallest particles within his being, for the insects and for the rocks, for the creatures of the sky and the air and the oceans.

The Garden of Eden legend represents a distorted version of man’s awakening as a physical creature. He becomes fully operational in his physical body, and while awake can only sense the dream body that had earlier been so real to him. He now encounters his experience from within a body that must be fed, clothed, protected from the elements—a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws. He must use physical muscles to walk from place to place. He sees himself suddenly, in a leap of comprehension, as existing for the first time not only apart from the environment, but apart from all of earth’s other creatures.

On the one hand, man did indeed feel that he had fallen from a high estate, because he remembered that earlier freedom of dream reality—a reality in which the other creatures were still to some degree (underlined) immersed.³ Man’s mind, incidentally, at that point had all the abilities that you now assign to it: the great capacity for contrast of imagination and intellect, the drive for objectivity and for subjectivity (softly), the full capacity for the development of language—a keen mind that was as brilliant in any caveman, say, as it is in any man on a modern street.

(9:35.) But if man felt suddenly alone and isolated, he was immediately struck by the grand variety of the world and its creatures. Each creature apart from himself was a new mystery. He was enchanted also by his own subjective reality, the body in which he found himself, and by the differences between himself and others like him, and the other creatures. He instantly began to explore (pause), to categorize, to point out and to name the other creatures of the earth as they came to his attention.

3. At first, as I typed this session from my notes a couple of days later, I thought that Seth had contradicted himself here, for earlier in the session he’d stated that “the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man’s did.” Then I came to think that Seth actually meant that man has consciously separated himself from his dream body to a greater degree than other creatures have—that even though those other entities became “physically effective” before man did, they still retain a greater awareness of their dream bodies than man does. I’ll try to remember to ask Seth to elaborate upon this point, although I also think he alludes to it later in this session.