“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.

(Pause at 9:35, one of many.) The language of love did not initially (underlined) involve images, either. Images in the mind, as they are understood, emerged in their present form only when man had, again, lost a portion of his love and identification, and forgotten how to identify with an image from its insides, and so began to view it from outside.

(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.) 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.

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 10:26.) 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.

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.

(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.