“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Our last session, the 775th, was not book dictation. Instead, Seth devoted it to “strings of consciousness” — explaining why Jane “picked up” the “William James” material, which is discussed in her book, Psychic Politics. Every once in a while she feels as if more material “from James” is available, though none has been forthcoming.)

Dictation. There are channels of interrelatedness, connecting all physical matter — channels through which consciousness flows.

In those terms of which I am speaking, man’s identification with nature allowed him to utilize those inner channels. He could send his own consciousness swimming, so to speak, through many currents, in which other kinds of consciousness merged. I said that the language of love was the one basic language, and I mean that quite literally. Man loved nature, identified with its many parts, and added to his own sense of being by joining into its power and identifying with its force.

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.

The language or the method of communication can best be described perhaps as direct cognition. Direct cognition is dependent upon a lover’s kind of identification, where what is known is known. At that stage no words or even images were needed. The wind outside and the breath were felt to be one and the same, so that the wind was the earth breathing out the breath that rose from the mouths of the living, spreading out through the earth’s body. Part of a man went out with breath — therefore, man’s consciousness could go wherever the wind traveled. A man’s consciousness, traveling with the wind, became part of all places.

(Long pause at 10:03.) Or: “Taking on my tree nature, I rest in my shade.” Or even: “From my man nature, I rest in the shade of my tree nature.” A man did not so much stand at the shore looking down at the water, as he immersed his consciousness within it. Man’s initial curiosity did not involve seeing, feeling, or touching the object’s nature as much as it involved a joyful psychic exploration in which he plunged his consciousness, rather than, say, his foot into the stream — though he did both.

If that language I speak of had been verbal, man never would have said: “The water flows through the valley.” Instead, the sentence would have read something like this: “Running over the rocks, my water self flows together with others in slippery union.” That translation is not the best, either. Man did not designate his own as the only kind of consciousness by any means. He graciously thanked the tree that gave him shade, for example, and he understood that the tree retained its own identity even when it allowed his awareness to join with it.

(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.