“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ancestors had worked the same fields, walked the same paths, and to that extent the past was open-ended rather than closed. The people believed that those ancestors still existed in the Christian heaven—or, earlier, in the Roman equivalent and they also believed that such a dimension awaited them to give them a further extension of existence after their own deaths.

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.

(9:51.) These were unlettered people. In a fashion (long pause) in this latest disaster, they took their land with them in their deaths. The land that is the environment, and the consciousness in your terms of the people, were part of each other in such a strong fashion that their energies merged (pause) to bring about the earthquake conditions.

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.

You feel now, by contrast, that you must get all of your living in between birth and death, that you must hurry to get everything done, so that time itself is indeed shortened. Your life seems to have no past behind it or future ahead of it, so identity itself seems foreshortened.

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.