“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. Initially, however, before the birth of images and words — as you understand them (underlined) — the world existed in different terms from those you know. Images as you consider them had not taken the form that you recognize. It seems to you that visually, for example, the natural world must be put together or perceived in a certain fashion.

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.) In ways most difficult to explain, man “absorbed” an animal’s spirit before he killed it, so that the spirit of the animal merged with his own. In using the animal’s flesh, then, the hunter believed that he was giving the animal a new focus of existence. He could draw on the animal’s strength, and the animal could join in human consciousness. Nature and spirit therefore were one.

Your own kind of focus emerged from such a background, so that within yourselves you contain myriad consciousnesses of which you are unaware. Through your own particular focus, the consciousnesses of the natural world merged to form a synthesis in which, for example, symphonies can emerge. You act not only for yourselves, but also for other kinds of consciousness that you have purposefully forgotten. In following your own purposes, which are yours, you also serve the purposes of others you have forgotten.

(Long pause at 10:37.) As a species “you” sought certain kinds of experience. Individually, and as tribes or nations, you follow certain “progressions” — and yet in so doing you act also on the part of the whole of nature. You take into your bodies in transmuted form the consciousnesses of all the things you consume.