“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After supper this evening I read over some of those 1973 private sessions that Seth referred to in last Monday night’s deleted session. Jane had marked three of them —running from September 10 to September 24, as being particularly good. They are. But I found that I thought an earlier one, for June 30, 1973, to be even better, more basic perhaps.

It is not just that the people related more to the land—though they did—but that they had a different kind of psychological extension, not only with nature, but in and with time itself. If they were isolated in spatial terms, they extended their imaginations and to some extent their lives and emotions both backward into the past and ahead into the future in ways that modern psychology has made most difficult.

Even though those village people lived in your era, however, they were largely untouched by modern technology, and so kept to their own ways. They and the land seemed one, sharing the present seasons, the daily work—but more than that, their fathers and their forefathers and usually many past generations of given families came from the same area. People lived in houses shared by their elders that had earlier been shared by their elders backward through family lines, so that daily experience and family incident was not nearly as restrained to the present in your terms.

This provided them with a different kind of time framework psychologically—one that any peasant could relate to. The ordinary person, for example, in the western world cannot relate to a Darwinian past in that same fashion, and psychology robs him of any personal extension in the future after death, so in practical life most modern people have freedom of extension in space but less in time. The peasants of course worked closely with the land and seasons, with earth’s natural timing, and even though such work seemed to make time go faster, in the overall the sense of present time included a rich dimension from both present and past, so that in your terms it would seem longer by contrast —richer—when people went to bed earlier, lacking the night’s electricity.

You had a mass burial—land and people together, a folding-in of consciousness upon itself, of energies upon energies, as those people realized that their kind of existence could no longer be maintained. Those who survived reacted in the old fashion, sweating to build again, refusing better shelter, but the times had indeed changed. The balances of nature, culture, communication, transportation, had altered to such a degree that a real poverty had resulted, not simply simple basic but adequate living conditions. The people compared themselves to the rest of the world at times, and many of the young were beginning to leave, but those villages were, again, very like those in the times of Nebene and the Roman soldier. They had been plundered at times by wandering Roman soldiers of Rome’s empire. Some of the soldiers themselves had been recruited from such areas, leaving their families behind, and the old men to do the work.

The towns represent to you that different kind of orientation, however. It was one that Nebene knew of and respected, where the Roman soldier scoffed at what even then he considered the old ways. A lifetime, of whatever length, seemed longer then than it does now, for it was psychologically lengthened by that rich extension into both the future and the past. People just before the earthquake even related imaginatively not only to their own ancestors, but to their children’s children after their own deaths, as those children lived their lives in the same locations, in the same land area.

(10:09.) The entire structure was beginning to topple, however, and the poverty was overtaking the damned. There are many reasons, but mainly the relationship between the village people and the rest of the world had strained too far, stretched too far. (Pause.) The Roman soldier had been in several skirmishes in such a village, stealing livestock for his companions. Nebene had hidden out in one such village from the Romans. The farmers protected him. So there are different emotional connections along those lines.

It goes without saying that such people were not innovators. They had little use for book learning. People who were unusually intelligent were suspect, and did not fit in. They were usually forced to leave one way or another—sometimes simply because they felt so isolated in their own surroundings. Change was frowned upon. In the old days they paid what tribute they had to to the government, but otherwise kept to their own ways, and the same applies to the villages that were destroyed.

I do not want you to think that I am idealizing them, for their ways were not particularly gentle, but their experience with time was a rich vein of experience that is now most unusual—one that you were at least aware of in your own reincarnational episodes.

Now that particular feeling is relatively new in history as you understand it, for almost all cultures in the past have had their built-in extensions of identity that included a dimension of actuality of one kind or another, from which each individual emerged, and to which you would return. Such a framework may have been filled with potential problems, but there were usually ways in life to get around those ways that were specified according to religion or culture.

Hellfire, for example, hardly presents any desirable extension, but there was before hell always the hope that the sinner would repent, and even if hell became the feared future existence, it still preserved the nature of the human consciousness involved. Psychology and evolution thematically simply cut off man’s existence with death.

(Long pause at 10:25.) Nebene had a scholar’s distaste for the peasants, but he also possessed a solid respect for the overall framework of their existence. He had a tendency on the one hand to idealize them for their love of nature, and on the other hand he somewhat scorned their lack of intellectual breadth. The Roman soldier understood them far better, for he was originally of their stock.

You can both put them to use now, as you did then. Do not think of them as information in the past that in “all of this time” you should have used better —for time as you see does not behave in that fashion. (Long pause.) There are rhythms in your experience, so that some information comes freshly newly in life in your experience that in certain ways you overlooked before. But in all of this you must understand that whatever course you took in the meantime was in its way a proper course—not, say, a wrong one.

(Interesting, that we’re not supposed to focus now on the problem, but yet are to study and discuss the old material.... As I understand the present dilemma, over the long run, the more successful Jane becomes as a writer the more she feels she needs the symptoms to keep her chained to her desk, to cut out all distractions. In the short run, our troubles with Prentice-Hall lately, especially those revolving around Tam’s decision to leave Prentice full time, have touched off Jane’s latest poor reactions re her hips and legs. At the same time, her body tries desperately to reassert itself, while she feels threatened by the events stemming from Prentice, and so wants to keep clamping down.