“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You are not alone in physical reality, so obviously your picture of the world is also affected by the world views of others, and you play a part in their experiences. There is a constant waking give-and-take. The same give-and-take occurs in the dream state, however. You affect your world through your dreams, then, as much as you do through your waking activities. In terms of time, lapses had to occur as various species physically matured and developed. They did so in response to inner impetus. The many languages that are now known originated in what you can call, from your point of view, nonwaking reality. Words, again, are related to the neurological structure, and languages follow that pattern. In the dream state many kinds of communication occur, and there are inner translations. Two people with different languages can speak together quite clearly in certain dreams, and understand each other perfectly. They may each translate the communication into their familiar language.

Underneath this, however, there are basic inner sounds upon which all language is based, in which certain images give forth their own sound, and the two together portray clear, precise meaning.² A long time ago I said that language would be impossible were it not for its basis in telepathic communication³ — and that communication is built up of microscopic images and sounds. These are translated into different languages.

Your physical life and your dreaming life are so intimately connected that it can be misleading to say what I am about to say, colon: that waking experience springs from the unknown dream reality. On the one hand the statement is indeed true. On the other hand, the intricate inner workings make it impossible to separate one from the other. “Reality” operates basically, however, in a way that is perceived more clearly in the dream state. Freedom from time and place, the wider kind of communication, the great mobility of consciousness — all of these experiences under dreaming conditions are characteristic of the basic nature of reality — whereas your waking experience provides limitations that are indicators of certain conditions only. Period.

3. Seth could be referring to his remark in the 34th session for March 11, 1964: “Telepathic communications go on continually beneath consciousness, and without the aid of telepathy and of the inner senses, language itself would be meaningless. The hidden cues are the symbols that make language intelligible.”

Many theories have been advanced throughout history to explain the origins of speech. Prior to the 17th century, extensive searches and studies were made for a “natural” or Adamic language, a basic form of human communication that was supposed to underlie all racial languages; no such universal protolanguage was ever isolated. As science now reaches back into human beginnings, the already scanty evidence gradually disappears, until finally it seems highly unlikely that the species will ever really know how or when its language and/or speech started.

Numerous forms of vocal communication — whether “true” speech or not, in current opinion — undoubtedly existed among the ancestors of our species for many millennia before the appearance of late Neanderthal man, however; according to conservative estimates such methods could have been in use for well over two million years, perhaps beginning even with our prehuman or animal stages. Jane and I find certain other research claims inconceivable: that in some of those earlier times verbal exchanges between members of the species, whether they be called prehuman or human, could have been a hindrance rather than an asset. To us, even the potential for audible communication has always been as much a part of our creature states as arms and legs. I’m only noting that such abilities represent one more means, upon a vast time scale, by which consciousness inexhaustibly seeks to know itself in this camouflage reality.

Seth tells us, of course, that prehuman communication and human language and speech have originated in rhythmic patterns again and again, since in the far past our planet has seen the development of a number of presently unknown civilizations. See, for example, his material on reincarnational civilizations and the Lumanians in Chapter 15 of Seth Speaks. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, see his discussion on ancient man in the 702nd session, as well as Jane’s own material on the “innumerable species of man-in-the-making” in Appendix 6.

Certain presentations in Appendix 18 contain information from Seth about the distortive effects caused by words as he communicates through Jane. Review his excerpts from the 27th session for February 1964: “It is difficult for me to have to string out this material in words….”