“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This of course gave you at that time a different orientation of consciousness. Man did not see himself pitted against the elements, but allied with them, whatever their mood or behavior. I have explained that kind of consciousness fairly well in portions of Psyche that Ruburt is reading. Man could exult in nature’s energy, power, and splendor, even in the midst of the most fierce storm —in which, indeed, his life might be in danger.

In your terms, with time, historically, he began to lose this identification, so that an emotional separation began to occur between man and the elements, between man and the other manifestations of nature. He still sensed nature’s grandeur—(louder:) but that grandeur was no longer his own, and he felt less and less a part of it. Nature became an exterior power, more of an adversary, even though man has a love for the earth, the fields, and the grain that they yielded.

(Long pause at 9:41.) Your religions have been largely patterned from such self-disapproving bases. The thrust of your civilizations has been concerned with manipulating nature. Your latest snowstorm is an excellent example. Not only of nature’s power and its effects upon civilization, but it also provides you with a very small hint of the other side of the picture, for man despite himself has not lost entirely that identification with the elements. People still feel a part of nature’s power. Storms often, oddly enough it seems, bring out a feeling of adventuresomeness and neighborliness, because people are united—not against nature, as they may think, but by it. The good skier feels a part of the snowy hill, yet most skiers feel that the hill must be conquered. When you take a walk, you usually think of walking through nature, not realizing that you are a part of the scene through which you walk. The loss of a real, sensed, appreciated identification with nature has been largely responsible, however, for man’s attitude that self-disapproval is somehow a virtue.