“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: In your terms, speaking more or less historically, early man was in a more conscious relationship with Framework 2 than you are now.

As Ruburt mentioned in Psychic Politics, there are many gradations of consciousness, and as I mentioned in The Nature of the Psyche, early man used his consciousness in other ways than those you are familiar with. He often perceived what you would call the products of the imagination as sense data, for example, more or less objectified in the physical world.

I am putting this very simply here. It is far more complicated — and yet early man, for example, became aware of the fact that no man was injured without that event first being imagined to one extent or another. Therefore, imagined healings were utilized, in which a physical illness was imaginatively cured — and in those days the cures worked.

Regardless of your histories, those early men and women were quite healthy. They had strong teeth and bones. They dealt with the physical world through the purposeful use of the imagination, however, in a way now most difficult to understand. They realized they were mortal, and must die, but their greater awareness of Framework 2 allowed them a larger identification, so they understood that death was not only a natural necessity, but also an opportunity for other kinds of experience and development (see Note 1 for Session 803).

Men in those times protected themselves against storms, and yet in the same way they did not begrudge the storm its victims. They simply changed the alliances of their consciousnesses from the identification of self-within-the-flesh to self-within-the-storm. Man’s and nature’s intents were largely the same, and understood as such. Man did not fear the elements in those early times, as is now supposed.

(10:25.) Some of the experiences known by early man would seem quite foreign to you now. Yet in certain forms they come down through the centuries. Early man, again, perceived himself as himself, an individual. He felt that nature expressed for him the vast power of his own emotions. He projected himself out into nature, into the heavens, and imagined there were great personified forms that later turned into the gods of Olympus, for example. He was also aware of the life-force within nature’s smallest parts, however, and before sense data became so standardized he perceived his own version of those individualized consciousnesses which much later became the elementals, or small spirits. But above all he was aware of nature’s source.

It may be difficult for you to understand, but the events that you now recognize are as much the result of the realm of the imagination, as those experienced by early man when he perceived as real happenings that now you would consider hallucinatory, or purely imaginative.