“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When consciousness becomes overly exteriorized and no longer identifies strongly with nature, then it no longer properly identifies itself with the inner nature of its own actions. One’s own actions therefore seem to be as exteriorized, or apart from consciousness, as trees or rocks seem to be. The exteriorized consciousness will always see such an event as an earthquake by viewing only its immediate, sometimes tragic, results. Those results will seem meaningless, chaotic. Men caught in such an event will question “Why should this happen to me?”

Private events of tragedy seem in a smaller context to happen without man’s knowledge or without his consent. The overly exteriorized consciousness has cut itself off so that it no longer perceives the inner order of events. The world with its wars or disasters, its illnesses or poverty, its mass or private tragedies, seems to be thrust upon man or to happen—again without his consent.

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.

(10:06.) That inner knowledge is behind all of his myths. It is said that there must be something, surely, to the story of Christ, since civilization was so altered. And for one-thousand, nine-hundred and seventy-eight years Christianity has flourished in one way or another. For a time it fueled both the arts and political life. It peopled the world of man with saints, sinners, priests, and it peopled space with a God, a legion of angels, and a devil and his cohorts—so surely Christianity must be based upon fact.

At first, then, men perceived the Gods physically. These perceptions were different however than what you think of as ordinary ones. They appeared and disappeared as man perceived, and then did not perceive, these inner realities. These inner realities were “real.” These were what you might call vital, responding personages, born of emotions of creativity. Perhaps you could compare them to the natural psychic or emotional equivalent, the psychological equivalent, of nature’s clouds, sun, storms, or seasons.

(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.

Give us a moment.... As a people you are geared, say, to the exploration of the physical world. You climb mountains. It seldom occurs to you as a people that inner landscapes are as real, or that there are, say, psychological structures, usually unperceived, that are quite as real as any physical one. You are unable to see your own events as they interrelate with others. You do not understand that an idea can indeed change the world, unless you see firmly that the idea has a factual basis.

The inner landscape is no less real because you do not generally perceive it. In Framework 2 that inner landscape is the reality, and it is from that world that your physical events emerge.

If in your private subjective reality you label yourself, unthinkingly now, in too-limited a fashion, then you can see yourself for example as the isolated artist at the brunt of society, the misunderstood poet that must be protected from the world’s ways—mythic material that falls short. Such ideas can have strength only if you forget to identify yourself with the great inner order of nature, and with the physical natural world.