“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause.) New paragraph: In deeper terms their existence still continues, with offshoots in all directions. The world that you know is one development in time, the one that you recognize. The species actually took many other routes unknown to you, unrecorded in your history. Fresh creativity still emerges at that “point.” (Long pause, one of many.) In the reckoning that you accept, the species in its infancy obviously experienced selfhood in different terms from your own. Because this experience is so alien to your present concepts, and because it predated language as you understand it, it is most difficult to describe.

(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.

In those early times, then, consciousness was more mobile. Identity was more democratic. In a strange fashion this does not mean that individuality was weaker. Instead it was strong enough to accept within its confines many divergent kinds of experience. A person, then, looking out into the world of trees, waters and rock, wildlife and vegetation, literally felt that he or she was looking at the larger, materialized, subjective areas of personal selfhood.