“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Once again it was obvious that Jane didn’t feel well before the session began, although her delivery turned out to be quite steady and sometimes forceful. She moved about in her chair often while speaking for Seth.)

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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 at 10:25.) Nebene had a scholar’s distaste for the peasants, but he also possessed a solid respect for the overall framework of their existence. He had a tendency on the one hand to idealize them for their love of nature, and on the other hand he somewhat scorned their lack of intellectual breadth. The Roman soldier understood them far better, for he was originally of their stock.

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.

(While I was Christmas shopping this afternoon Jane called Tam; he’d just received our disclaimer letter. It appears the argument over the medical disclaimer for Mass Events may be on the way to a solution. Tam liked the letter.)