“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.)

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.

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.) 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.

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 10:20.) In a kind of emotional magnification unknown to you, each person’s private emotions were given an expression and release through nature’s changes — a release that was understood, and taken for granted. In the most profound of terms, weather conditions and the emotions are still highly related. The inner conditions cause the exterior climatic changes, though of course it now seems to you that it is the other way around.

(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.

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.

Your language must follow your perception, though the sound structure beneath need not. You say: “I am today, I was yesterday, and I will be tomorrow,” yet some languages would find such utterances incomprehensible, and the words, “I am” would be used in all instances.