“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.

You will have to give us time… (Pause, one of many.) When a man’s consciousness, for example, blended with that of a tree, those data became “visual” for others to perceive. When a man’s consciousness merged with an animal’s, that blending became visual data also.

In a manner of speaking, the brain put visual information together so that the visual contents of the world were not as stationary as they are now. You have learned to be highly specific in your physical sight and interpretations. Your mental vision holds hints as to data that could be, but are not visually, physically perceived. You have trained yourselves to react to certain visual cues which trigger your mental interpretations, and to ignore other variations.

(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.

(10:41.) Those consciousnesses then merge to perceive the world in a fashion you call your own. Through your eyes the beasts, vegetables, birds, and dust perceive the dawn and sunlight as you do — as you, and yet on the other hand your experience is your own.

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.

(11:25 P.M. “I just feel funny,” Jane said, “as if I’ve been where it was too smooth for my consciousness to get a grip on anything.” It wasn’t easy for her to put her feelings into words. “Yet I feel as though I’ve been doing things there — perceiving in a different way while Seth was giving the session.” She also felt that Seth had translated some of those now-forgotten experiences into the session’s material.

(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.”)