“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Tonight, Seth suggested that “portions of this session can be appended to the book,” meaning Dreams, but I found it easier to offer most of his generalized material verbatim while eliminating his information on one of my dreams.)

In that picture consciousness has little part to play. In man’s very early history, however, and in your terms for centuries after the “awakening,” as described in our book, people lived in good health for much longer periods of time—and in certain cases they lived for several centuries.¹ No one had yet told them that this was impossible, for one thing. Their sense of wonder in the world, their sense of curiosity, creativity, and the vast areas of fresh mental and physical exploration, kept them alive and strong. For another thing, however, elders were highly necessary and respected for the information they had acquired about the world. They were needed. They taught the other generations.

I checked several Bibles, a Biblical almanac, and a Biblical dictionary. But one has only to read Chapter 5 of Genesis to learn what great ages are given to Adam and nine of his descendants up to Noah, or the time of the Flood. Did Adam really live for 930 years, or Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, for 912? (Why isn’t Eve’s age given in the Bible?) Enoch, the fifth elder listed after Seth, lived for a mere 365 years, but sired Methuselah, who at 969 years is the oldest individual recorded in the Bible. Methuselah was the father of Lamech (777 years), who was the father of Noah (950 years).

During the little time we’d spent thinking about such matters, Jane and I had considered the Biblical accounts of such great ages to be simply wrong, badly distorted, or perhaps epochal—that is, Abraham’s ancestors may be listed in the correct genealogical sequence, but with many gaps among the individuals named. Also, a given father-son relationship may have actually been one between a father and a great-great-grandson, for example. There are other epochal lists in the Bible.

Second: “The Bible is a conglomeration of parables and stories, intermixed with some unclear memories of much earlier times. The Bible that you recognize—or that is recognized—is not the first, however, but was compiled from several earlier ones as man tried to look back, so to speak, recount his past and predict his future. Such Bibles existed, not written down but carried orally, as mentioned some time ago, by the Speakers. It was only much later that this information was written down, and by then of course much had been forgotten. This is apart from the fact of tampering, or downright misinformation, as various factions used the material for their own ends.”

“In brilliant, limpid color: I dreamed that a ship—a freighter colored a warm gray and a rust-red-orange—sank in the ocean. I was underwater, to one side, and viewed everything as an observer. I watched the ship sink on an even keel through the blue-green water to the smooth yellow and tan and brown sandy ocean floor—but instead of settling motionless there the ship began to ‘sail’ or plow its way across the ocean bottom, almost as though it were a car moving along a road. I saw waves of sand gracefully rise up from the bow of the freighter. I saw no people or fish—just the ship, the ocean, and its floor, which was free of obstacles to the ship’s easy passage. The fact that the ship could navigate that way underwater was a revelation to me, and I knew that in some way this boded well for my future. I was very pleased. The colors were beautiful. I’d really like to do a painting of this dream.”