“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Initially language had nothing to do with words, and indeed verbal language emerged only when man had lost a portion of his love, forgotten some of his identification with nature, so that he no longer understood its voice to be his also. In those early days man possessed a gargantuan arena for the expression of his emotions. He did not symbolically rage with the storms, for example, but quite consciously identified with them to such a degree that he and his tribesmen merged with the wind and lightning, and became a part of the storms’ forces. They felt, and knew as well, that the storms would refresh the land, whatever their fury.

Because of such identification with nature, the death experience, as you understand it, was in no way considered an end. The mobility of consciousness was a fact of experience. The self was not considered to be stuck within the skin. The body was considered more or less like a friendly home or cave, kindly giving the self refuge but not confining it.

(A one-minute pause.) Each natural element had its own key system that interlocked with others, forming channels through which consciousness could flow from one kind of life to another. Man understood himself to be a separate entity, but one that was connected to all of nature. The emotional reaches of his subjective life, then, leapt far beyond what you think of as private experience. Each person participating fully in a storm, for example, still participated in his or her own individual way. Yet the grandeur of the emotions was allowed full sway, and the seasons of the earth and the world were jointly felt.

In your terms, the use of language began as man lost this kind of identification. I must stress again that the identification was not symbolic, but practical, daily expression. Nature spoke for man, and man for nature.

(Long pause at 10:18.) In a manner of speaking, the noun and the verb were one. The noun did not disappear, but expressed itself as the verb.

(Long pause at 10:26.) You are robbed, then, or you rob yourselves, of one of the most basic kinds of expression, since you can no longer identify yourselves with the forces of nature. Man wanted to pursue a certain kind of consciousness, however. In your terms, over a period of time he pulled his awareness in, so to speak; he no longer identified as he did before, and began to view objects through the object of his own body. He no longer merged his awareness, so that he learned to look at a tree as one object, where before he would have joined with it, and perhaps viewed his own standing body from the tree’s vantage point. It was then that mental images became important in usual terms — for he had understood these before, but in a different way, from the inside out.

Now he began to draw and sketch, and to learn how to build images in the mind that were connected to real exterior objects in the presently accepted manner. Now he walked, not simply for pleasure, but to gain the information he wanted, to cross distances that before his consciousness had freely traveled. So he needed primitive maps and signs. Instead of using whole images he used partial ones, fragments of circles or lines, to represent natural objects.

(11:19.) This provides you with a certain kind of communication, but it also allows a molecular expression that is natural at that level, and then used by you for your own purposes. I am not saying that molecules speak. I am saying that they are expressed through your speech, however — and that your speech represents an amplification of their existence. Through your words their reality is amplified, in the same way that man’s emotions once found amplification through the physical elements.

To some extent punctuation is sound that you do not hear, a pause that implies the presence of withheld sound. To some extent, then, language is as dependent upon the unspoken as the spoken, and the rhythm of silence as well as of sound. In that context, however, silence involves merely a pause of sound in which sound is implied but withheld. Inner sound deals primarily with that kind of relationship. Language is meaningful only because of the rhythm of the silence upon which it rides.

(11:33.) Its meaning comes from the pauses between the sounds as much as it does from the sounds themselves. The flow of breath is obviously important, regulating the rhythm and the spacing of the words. The breath’s integrity arises directly from the proper give-and-take between cells, the functioning of the tissues; and all that is the expression of molecular competence. That competence is obviously responsible for language, but beyond that it is intimately connected with the patterns of languages themselves, the construction of syntax, and even with the figures of speech used.

Again, you speak for yourselves; yet in doing so you speak a language that is not yours alone, but the result of inner communications too swift for you to follow, involving corporal and subjective realities alike. For this reason your languages have meaning on several levels. The sounds you make have physical effects on your own and other bodies. There is a sound value, then, as apart from a meaning value.