“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.

(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.

(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.

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.”

(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.