“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.

(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.

(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.

Your concepts about death and nature, however, force you to see man and nature as adversaries, and also program your experience of such events so that they seem to only confirm what you already believe. As I mentioned earlier (in Session 821), each person caught in either an epidemic or a natural disaster will have private reasons for choosing those circumstances. Such conditions also often involve events in which the individual senses a larger identification, however — even sometimes a renewed sense of purpose that makes no sense in ordinary terms.