“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.

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.

Take the English sentence: “I observe the tree.” If that original language had words, the equivalent would be: “As a tree, I observe myself.”

(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.

(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.

The words you speak to someone else are in certain terms broken down by the listener to basic components, and understood at different levels. There are psychological interpretations made, and molecular ones. The sounds and their pauses will express emotional states, and reactions to these will alter the body’s condition to whatever degree.

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.

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.