“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.

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.

(10:09.) The entire structure was beginning to topple, however, and the poverty was overtaking the damned. There are many reasons, but mainly the relationship between the village people and the rest of the world had strained too far, stretched too far. (Pause.) The Roman soldier had been in several skirmishes in such a village, stealing livestock for his companions. Nebene had hidden out in one such village from the Romans. The farmers protected him. So there are different emotional connections along those lines.

It goes without saying that such people were not innovators. They had little use for book learning. People who were unusually intelligent were suspect, and did not fit in. They were usually forced to leave one way or another—sometimes simply because they felt so isolated in their own surroundings. Change was frowned upon. In the old days they paid what tribute they had to to the government, but otherwise kept to their own ways, and the same applies to the villages that were destroyed.