“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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).

Much is not understood in your interpretations. In that world men knew that nature was balanced. Both animals and men must die. If a man was caught and eaten by animals, as sometimes happened, [his fellows] did not begrudge that animal its prey — at least, not in the deepest of terms. And when they slayed other animals themselves and ate the heart, for example, it was not only to obtain the animals’ “stout hearts,” or fearlessness; but also the intent was to preserve those characteristics so that through men’s experiences each animal would continue to live to some extent.

(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.

It seems quite clear to you that the mass events of nature are completely outside of your domain. You feel you have no part in nature except as you exert control over it through technology, or harm it, again through technology. You grant that the weather has an effect upon your moods, but any deeper psychic or psychological connections between you and the elements strikes most of you as quite impossible.

Death is not an end, but a transformation of consciousness. Nature, with its changing seasons, constantly brings you that message. In that light, and with that understanding, nature’s disasters do not claim victims: Nature and man together act out their necessary parts in the larger framework of reality.