“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.

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.

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.

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.

I do not want you to think that I am idealizing them, for their ways were not particularly gentle, but their experience with time was a rich vein of experience that is now most unusual—one that you were at least aware of in your own reincarnational episodes.

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.

(Long pause.) I mention these ideas of time also now because they fit in so well with your joint personal preoccupation with time—how to use it, and so forth. (Long pause.) Nebene could also give you more on such issues if you ever find the time (amused).

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.

(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.