“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.

Dictation. (Long pause.) At the time of this awakening man did experience, then, some sense of separation from his dream body, and from his own inner reality—the world of his dreams—but he was still far more aware of that subjective existence than you are now.

The practical nature of his own dreams was also more apparent, for again, his dreams sent him precise visions as to where food might be located, for example, and for some centuries there were human migrations of a kind that now you see the geese make. All of those journeys followed literal paths that were given as information in the dream state. [But] more and more man began to identify himself with his exterior environment. He began to think of his inner ego almost as if it were a stranger to himself. It became his version of the soul, and there seemed to be a duality—a self who acted in the physical universe, and a separate spiritlike soul that acted in an immaterial world.

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.

They have the capacity to respond to multitudinous cues. There is a great elasticity for action and mobility, so that, for example, in man his conscious experience can actually be put together in an almost limitless number of ways.

(Long pause, then very intently:) We will return to the subject of war later on. I want to mention here, however, that man is not basically endowed with “warlike characteristics.” He does not naturally murder. He does not naturally seek to destroy his own life or [the lives of] others. There is no battle for survival—but while you project such an idea upon natural reality, then you will read nature, and your own experiences with it, in that fashion.

Man does have an instinct and a desire to live, and he has an instinct and a desire to die. The same applies to other creatures. In his life [each] man is embarked upon a cooperative venture with his own species, and with the other species, and dying he also in that regard acts in a cooperative manner, returning his physical substance to the earth. (Pause.) Physically speaking, man’s “purpose” is to help enrich the quality of existence in all of its dimensions. Spiritually speaking, his “purpose” is to understand the qualities of love and creativity, to intellectually and psychically understand the sources of his being, and to lovingly create other dimensions of reality of which he is presently unaware. (Pause.) In his thinking, in the quality of his thoughts, in their motion, he is indeed experimenting with a unique and a new kind of reality, forming other subjective worlds which will in their turn grow into consciousness and song, which will in their turn flower from a dream dimension into other ones. Man is learning to create new worlds. In order to do so he has taken on many challenges.

You are aware of such activities now as automatic speaking and automatic writing, and of sleepwalking. These all give signs in modern times of some very important evidence in man’s early relationship with the world and with himself.

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.