“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.

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.

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.

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.