“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Faster at 10:45:) The god concept then was an aid, and an important one, to man’s emerging ego. To develop its sense of specialization, the ego forgot the great cooperative venture of the earth. If a hunter literally knows his relationship with an animal, he cannot kill it. On deeper levels both animal and man understand the connections. Biologically the man knows he has come from the earth. Some of his cells have been the cells of animals, and the animal knows he will look out through a man’s eyes.³ The earth venture is cooperative. The slain beast is tomorrow’s hunter. In terms of ego consciousness, however, there were stages of growth; and the god concepts that spoke of oneness with nature were not those that served the ego’s purposes in the line of development as you understand it (deliberately).

The concepts of God that you have, have gone hand-in-hand with the development of your consciousness. The ego, emerging, needed to feel its dominance and control, and so it imagined a dominant god apart from nature. Often nations acted as group egos — each with its own god-picturing, its own concepts of power. Whenever a tribe or a group or a nation decided to embark upon a war, it always used the concept of its god to lead it on.

(Another one-minute pause.) Give us a moment … The “unknown” reality sustains you and the web of life as you understand it. Your conscious concepts must enlarge so that the conscious self can understand its true nature. As you think of it, consciousness is barely — barely — half developed. It has learned to identify with one small group of neurologically accepted responses. Portions of the brain not used lie latent, waiting for the recognition that will trigger them into activity (intently). When this happens, the mind will become aware of the rich bed of probabilities upon which the ego now rides so blindly.

It was known, however — and unconsciously written in the cells and mind and heart — that this procedure would only go so far. When man’s consciousness was sure of itself it would not need to be so narrowly focused. Then the true flowering of humanity’s consciousness could begin. Then the ego could expand and become aware of realities it had “earlier” ignored. Period.

“The growth of ego consciousness by itself set up both challenges and limitations. This automatically meant that emerging man, in that framework, must let go of a certain kind of animal comprehension that was extremely valuable overall, but could inhibit ego growth … For many centuries there was no clear-cut differentiation between various species of man and animal … There were also, of course, parallel developments in the emergence of physical man. [...]