“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Because of the beliefs of religion, the child expected God to show his power through some disastrous act by which sinners would be punished. That child’s life already carries the marks of her beliefs about religion, God, power, and mainly in the belief that nature is a tool in the God’s hands—to be used against man at any time.

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?”

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.

Myths are far more powerful than any facts, and they carry with them the great sway of nature’s own emotional force as it is interpreted through man’s experience. Facts certainly seem to be provable in your world. Myths are generally considered to be distorted facts, interpreted by primitive minds, or the result of creative acts of the imagination. That power is little understood, much less its reasons.

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.

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.

They are quite as real in the emotional landscape of man’s psyche, as the elements of the skyscape are above his planet. Myths always weave in and out of historical context, even as dreams are related to daily life. Myths usually include, then, some “provable facts,” either of people historically known to have lived, or in terms of places or physical events of a natural kind. These are often taken then as proof that the myth is fact.

(10:37.) Christ tried to return man to nature. In a manner of speaking, again, there was no one Christ, historically speaking, but the personage of Christ, or the entity, was the reality from which the entire dramatic story emerged.

Historically speaking, the ancients understood man’s psychology, his psyche, far better than you do now, for they were far more aware of its context. Their identification with nature gave them a sense of man’s emotional power. They understood that dreams represented a reality as valid as the physical one, and they did not see the two worlds as separate. The early gods carried remnants of that grandeur.

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.

When you identify with nature you automatically fulfill your own world. Your dreams instantly come to life, and appear in your experience as aids and guides. You need not pit yourselves then against what you think of as a society that does not understand you, for that society falls into place as simply being one present aspect of a vaster natural world in which you are indeed firmly rooted. You can therefore naturally draw from Framework 2 all that you require.

Again, have Ruburt remember his love of nature. I will say nothing about the “fact” that you have not together studied the last session, or that Ruburt has not used the hot towels, for I do not need to. I do want you to approve of yourselves as natural creatures, for that approval automatically brings you in contact with nature’s greater source, and your own.

—and a hearty, natural good evening.