“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.

(9:04.) Again, the environment as you think of it is composed of living consciousness. Ancient religions, for example, speak of nature’s spirits, and such terms represent memories dating from prehistory. Part of consciousness, then, transformed itself into what you think of as nature—the vast sweep of the continents, the oceans and the rivers, the mountains and the valleys, the body of the land. The creative thrust of the physical world must rise from that living structure.

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.