“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Some people are naturally solitary. They want to live lone lives, and are content. Most, however, have a need for enduring, close relationships. These provide both a psychic and social framework for personal growth, understanding, and development. It is an easy enough matter to shout to the skies: “I love my fellow men,” when on the other hand you form no strong, enduring relationship with others. It is easy to claim an equal love for all members of the species, but love itself requires an understanding that at your level of activity is based upon intimate experience. You cannot love someone you do not know — not unless you water down the definition of love so much that it becomes meaningless.

The span of a god’s love can perhaps equally hold within its vision the existences of all individuals at one time in an infinite loving glance that beholds each person, seeing each with all his or her peculiar characteristics and tendencies. Such a god’s glance would delight in each person’s difference from each other person. This would not be a blanket love, a soupy porridge of a glance in which individuality melted, but a love based on a full understanding of each individual. The emotion of love brings you closest to an understanding of the nature of All That Is. Love incites dedication, commitment. It specifies. You cannot, therefore, honestly insist that you love humanity and all people equally if you do not love one other person. If you do not love yourself, it is quite difficult to love another.

In your world you identify as yourself only, and yet love can expand that identification to such an extent that the intimate awareness of another individual is often a significant portion of your own consciousness. You look outward at the world not only through your eyes, but also, to some extent at least, through the eyes of another. It is true to say, then, that a portion of you figuratively walks with this other person as he or she goes about separate from you in space.

All of this also applies to the animals to varying degrees. Even in animal groups, individuals are not only concerned with personal survival, but with the survival of “family” members. Each individual in an animal group is aware of the others’ situations. The expression of love is not confined to your own species, therefore, nor is tenderness, loyalty, or concern. Love indeed does have its own language — a basic nonverbal one with deep biological connotations. It is the initial basic language from which all others spring, for all languages’ purposes rise from those qualities natural to love’s expression — the desire to communicate, create, explore, and to join with the beloved.

(Long pause at 11:22.) Give us a moment… Speaking historically in your terms, man first identified with nature, and loved it, for he saw it as an extension of himself even while he felt himself a part of its expression. In exploring it he explored himself also. He did not identify as himself alone, but because of his love, he identified also with all those portions of nature with which he came into contact. This love was biologically ingrained in him, and is even now biologically pertinent.

(11:39.) Generally you experience the self as isolated from nature, and primarily enclosed within your skin. Early man did not feel like an empty shell, and yet selfhood existed for him as much outside of the body as within it. There was a constant interaction. It is easy to say to you that such people could identify, say, with the trees, but an entirely different thing to try to explain what it would be like for a mother to become so a part of the tree underneath which her children played that she could keep track of them from the tree’s viewpoint, though she was herself far away.

I am certainly putting this in the most simple of terms, but a bird may have a nest, though it leaves it frequently and never confuses itself with its nesting place. In a manner of speaking that is what you have done, though the body is more animate than the nest.

(12:19.) A man might merge his own consciousness with a running stream, traveling in such a way for miles to explore the layout of the land. To do this he became part water in a kind of identification you can barely understand — but so did the water then become part of the man.