“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This afternoon Jane told me that she’d been picking up from Seth about the poor Italian villages that had been destroyed in the great earthquake of November 23. As noted, I’m quite interested in that area, though not only in our present time frame.

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.

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.

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.

(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.