“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now—some remarks generally, having to do with the kinds of villages in Italy that so took your interest. There were many such villages in the mountains in the overall times of Nebene and your Roman soldier, and they were much in character like the villages recently destroyed in the earthquake. They dealt with a different framework of consciousness—one that is somewhat now out of character with your kind. I mentioned that modern psychology actually short-changed you, trying to fit itself into Darwinian beliefs. Those Italian villages exemplified really a kind of consciousness, or an orientation of consciousness, that existed before modern psychology and Darwinian belief: a framework of consciousness and experience that was overall similar in the recent past and in the time of the Romans—one, in other words, that existed up into the present.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.