“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The conventionally religious will be certain that the earthquake is a punishment for sin. The scientist will see the affair as relatively neutral —an event, however, in which man is certainly a pawn, caught by chance in a catastrophe that he would otherwise most certainly avoid. The earthquake is a mass natural catastrophe, seeming then to be perpetrated upon man and his cities by an earth that certainly does not take man or his civilization into consideration.

The emotional identification with nature meant that man had a far greater and richer personal emotional reality. That love of nature, and appreciation, quickened and utilized inner biological capacities, also possessed by plants and animals, so that man was more consciously aware of his part in nature. He identified with natural events. It is almost impossible in your time to describe man’s reality when he was consciously aware that he would die and yet not die, and when he was everywhere surrounded by those inner data of his psyche.

Those data were equal in his experience to those physical data of the world, so that the two kinds of experience constantly enriched each other. Man then understood that he did form his own reality in all of its aspects, both privately and en masse, and in terms of natural earth events, as well as for example the events of his society. You cannot of course limit your world to the world of facts at any given time, though you may try to do so. That little girl’s experience with the earthquake, and her beliefs about it, have little to do with the bare facts involved. She is dealing instead with an inner world of myths.

When man identified with the grandeur and energy of nature, then he knew nature’s reasons, for they were his own as well. He knew his death, his personal death, was only a transition, for his identification allowed him to feel the mobility of his consciousness, and allowed him to feel a sense of communion with the passing seasons, and with the ever-constant renewal of plants and fields. He did not need to look for a reason for nature’s destructive aspects, for he knew through experience the great sweep of its vitality. He knew no Gods were sending down vengeance.

The first Gods began the process of man’s exterior consciousness, so that the portions of nature with which he no longer identified were gradually deified, and put outside of himself. I have told you that your physical habits of perception are learned, and that the world can indeed be physically put together in different fashions. Events such as hallucinations give you hints of this.

(Long pause at 10:47.) The greater creative drama involved occurred for centuries. Christ tried to tell men that he was everywhere, but they could not understand. He did not want a church, but an inner brotherhood. He was not born of a virgin, nor was his physical history any more factual than that once given for Zeus, or Apollo, or the Egyptian gods. His reality however did change the consciousness of man.