“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.

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.