“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

It is not so much that he personified the elements of nature as that he threw his personality into its elements and rode them, so to speak. As mentioned, love incites the desire to know, explore, and communicate with the beloved; so language began as man tried to express his love for the natural world.

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.

(Long pause.) A person’s identity was private, in that man always knew who he was. He was so sure of his identity that he did not feel the need to protect it, so that he could expand his awareness in a way now quite foreign to you.

(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.

He had always made sounds that communicated emotions, intent, and sheer exuberance. When he became involved with sketched or drawn images, he began to imitate their form with the shape of his lips. The “O” was perfect, and represents one of his initial, deliberate sounds of verbalized language.

I said before that early man felt a certain emotional magnification, that he felt, for example, the wind’s voice as his own. In a manner of speaking your languages, while expressing your individual intents and communications, also represent a kind of amplification arising from your molecular configurations. The wind makes certain sounds that are dependent upon the characteristics of the earth. The breath makes certain sounds that are dependent upon the characteristics of the body. There is a connection between alphabets and the molecular structure that composes your tissue. Alphabets then are natural keys also. Such natural keys have a molecular history. You form these keys into certain sound patterns that have particular meanings.

The listener then breaks down the language. He builds up his own response. You have so connected words and images that language seems to consist of a sound that suggests an image. Yet some languages have had sounds for feelings and subjective states, and they had no subjects or predicates, nor even a sentence structure that you would recognize.