“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

(10:40.) Give us a moment… You use terms like “being flooded by emotion,” however, and other very intuitive statements showing your own deeper recognition of events that quite escape you when you examine them through reason alone. Man actually courts storms. He seeks them out, for emotionally he understands quite well their part in his own private life, and their necessity on a physical level. Through nature’s manifestations, particularly through its power, man senses nature’s source and his own, and knows that the power can carry him to emotional realizations that are required for his own greater spiritual and psychic development.