“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane has been feeling much better in recent days as far as her physical “symptoms” go; she’s had some good spontaneous relaxation periods, and her walking has improved considerably. Her creative output also goes well. She’s been working on “I Am Alive Again,” her longest poem for If We Live Again. When she lay down for a nap yesterday afternoon she picked up from Seth hints of subjects he’s going to discuss in Dreams: “man migrations,” and “inside and outside cues” as pertaining to man’s consciousness. She hopes Seth will go into that material tonight. This afternoon she finished typing her final version of Chapter 5 for God of Jane.

This early man (and early woman) regarded the snake as the most sacred and basic, most secretive and most knowledgeable of all creatures. In that early experience it seemed, surely, that the snake was a living portion of the earth, rising from the bowels of the earth, rising from the hidden source of all earth gods. Men watched snakes emerge from their holes with wonder. The snake was then—in your terms, now (underlined)—both a feminine and masculine symbol. It seemed to come from the womb of the earth, and to possess the earth’s secret wisdom. Yet also, in its extended form particularly, it was the symbol of the penis. It was important also in that it shed its skin, as man innately knew he shed his own bodies.

In the same fashion man is born with an inbuilt propensity for language, and for the communication of symbols through pictures and writing. He spoke first in an automatic fashion that began in his dreams. In a fashion (underlined), you could almost say that he used language before he consciously understood it (quietly). It is not just that he learned by doing, but that the doing did the teaching. Again, lest there be a sharply inquiring intellect, wondering overmuch about how the words were formed or what motions were necessary, his drawing was in the same way automatic. You might almost say—almost—that he used the language (pause) “despite himself.” Therefore, it possessed an almost magical quality, and the “word” was seen as coming directly from God.