“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.