“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.

The imagination has always dealt with creativity, and as man began to settle upon a kind of consciousness that dealt with cause and effect, he no longer physically perceived the products of his imagination directly in the old manner. He realized in those earlier times that illness, for instance, was initially as much the result of the imagination as health was, for he experienced far more directly the brilliant character of his own imagination. The lines between imaginative and physical experience have blurred for you, and of course they have also become tempered by other beliefs and the experiences that those beliefs then engender.

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.

He was filled with wonder as his own consciousness ever-newly came into being. He had not yet covered over that process with the kind of smooth continuity that your own consciousness has now achieved — so when he thought a thought he was filled with curiosity: Where had it come from? His own consciousness, then, was forever a source of delight, its changing qualities as noticeable and apparent as the changing sky. The relative smoothness of your own consciousness — in those terms, at least — was gained at the expense of certain other experiences, therefore, that were possible otherwise. You could not live in your present world of time if your consciousness was as playful, curious, and creative as it was, for [then] time was also experienced far differently.

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.