“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.

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.