“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

JANE’S SKILL AS ANCIENT AS MAN IS. THE SPECIES’ MULTITUDINOUS ABILITIES.

(I’d just finished typing the last few pages for Monday night’s session, and I asked Jane what she thought of my final note: I’d speculated about any reincarnational connections that might tie her abilities to speak for Seth, without help of any modern kind, to the abilities ancient man had displayed, when, according to Seth, he’d been able to carry all of his history with him mentally. As ancient man had lived without the news media we’re so used to, so does Jane speak for Seth without all of that modern help. I hadn’t expected Seth to go into related material this evening.)

Now: Ruburt’s skill is as ancient as man is, and indeed all of your arts, sciences, and cultural achievements are the offshoots of (pause) spontaneous mental and biological processes.

In the first place, as often mentioned lately, the reasoning mind is spontaneously fired. The species contains within itself all of the necessary spontaneous attributes that are necessary to form a civilization, for example. (Pause.) All of your reasoned activities — your governments, societies, arts, religions and sciences — are the physical realization, of course, of inner capacities, capacities that are inherent in man’s structure. Take your theaters’ moving picture dramas. These are the materialization in your time of man’s natural acting ability — a characteristic highly important in the behavior of the species.

Early man, for example, spontaneously played at acting out the part of other animals. He took the part of a tree, a brook, a rock. Acting became a teaching method — a way of passing on information. (Long pause.) Man always possessed all of the knowledge he needed. The task was to make it physically available.

People like Ruburt translated inner knowledge in many ways — through acting it out, through singing or dancing, through drawing images on cave walls. It was the intellect’s job to put such information to practical use, and thus the intuitions and the intellect worked hand in hand. (Long pause.) Man dealt then with spontaneous knowing in a more direct fashion.

(Pause at 9:10.) It is very difficult to try to explain the various shadings of psychology that were involved. Early man did act in a more spontaneous manner, more automatically, in your terms, but not mindlessly. If you remember the early portions of our latest book (Mass Events), then this information should fall into place, for consciousness emerged from the inside outward. Animals enjoy drama, and in their fashions they playact.

It was left to man to translate his inner information with a free hand. He is able to form many different kinds of cultures, for example. He puts his sciences and religions, his languages, together in multitudinous ways, but there must always be a translation of inner information outward to the world of sense. There still is. Man’s capacities have not dimmed in that regard. Thinking, for example, is as automatic as ever (amused). It is simply that your culture puts the various elements together in ways that stress the qualities of what you refer to as rational thinking.

Poetry was an art and a science. It conveyed quite necessary information about man and the universe. The same can be said of many cave drawings. What you had — what you still have, though you are not nearly as aware of it — was an excellent give-and-take between the inner and outer senses. Through chanting, dancing, playacting, painting, story-telling, man spontaneously translated inner sense data into physical actualization. The physical senses only present you with clues as to your own sensitivities.