“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Whatever your language, you perceive trees, mountains, people, oceans. You never see a man merge with a tree, for example. This would be considered an hallucinatory image. Your visual data are learned and interpreted so that they appear as the only possible results of those data. Inner vision can confound you, because in your mind you often see images quite clearly that you would dismiss if your eyes were open. In the terms of which we are speaking, however, the young species utilized what I have called the “inner senses” to a far greater degree than you do. Visually, early man did not perceive the physical world in the way that seems natural to you.

(Long pause at 10:05.) Data, you say, are stored in the chromosomes, strung together in a certain fashion. Now biologically that is direct cognition. The inner senses perceive directly in the same fashion. To you, language means words. Words are always symbols for emotions or feelings, intents or desires. Direct cognition did not need the symbols. The first language, the initial language, did not involve images or words, but dealt with a free flow of directly cognitive material.

In thinking your own private thoughts, you also add to a larger psychic and mental reality of which you are part. Your languages program your perceptions, and limit your communications in certain terms (underlined) as much as they facilitate it.

(Pause.) A musician writing a symphony, however, does not use all of the notes that are available to him. He chooses and discriminates. His discrimination is based upon his knowledge of the information available, however. In the same way, your languages are based upon an inner knowledge of larger available communications. The “secrets” of languages are not to be found, then, in the available sounds, accents, root words or syllables, but in the rhythms between the words; the pauses and hesitations; the flow with which the words are put together, and the unsaid inferences that connect verbal and visual data.

(10:44.) To some extent it is true to say that languages emerged as you began to lose direct communication with your own experience, and with that of others. Language is therefore a substitute for direct communication. The symbols of the words stand for your own or someone else’s experience, while protecting you or them from it at the same time.

Visual data as you perceive them amount to visual language; the images perceived are like visual words. An object is presented to your visual perception so that you can safely perceive it from the outside. Objects as you see them are also symbols.

Now: Ruburt’s sense of strangeness is indeed connected with this evening’s material. He was, however briefly, involved in a process that enabled him to reach beneath verbal or imagery language.

Let him rest. he has become aware of distances in his own consciousness, in a fashion difficult to describe. Neurologically he became familiar to some extent with the stuff beneath language, the inner rhythms unexpressed, and felt the odd connections that exist between words and your sense of time. This confused him, for this was material directly felt but verbally inexpressible. He will readjust “in no time.”

(Jane’s strange feelings were over by the time we went to bed. The next morning, though, she reported dream experiences that had been brilliantly clear at the time; in them she’d been “perceiving images or objects as language.”)