“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.

(“Well, I think it’s going to be a short session,” she finally laughed. “I feel restless — like going for a walk in the snow or something….” But the session hardly proved to be a short one. In connection with the practice element that Seth gives below, plus the following two paragraphs of related information, I’d like the reader to refer to chapters 7 and 8 in Jane’s Adventures in Consciousness. In them she discussed the development of her Sumari “language.”

In a way, the one-line kind of consciousness that you have developed can be correlated with your use of any one language. Experience is programmed, highly specialized, and attains a seemingly tight organization only because (intently) it limits so much of reality. In those terms, if you are bilingual you are somewhat better off, for your thoughts have a choice of two paths. Biologically, you are physically capable of speaking any language now in use on the face of the earth. You would consider it an achievement if you learned to speak many languages. You would not find it frightening or unnatural, though you would take it for granted that some training was involved. In the same way, your one-line kind of consciousness is but one of many “languages.” The others are as native, as natural, as biologically feasible.

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.

6. Reading backward is something I’ve casually indulged in for many years. I don’t think those actions inspired Seth’s advice here, although my unconscious motivations for such a practice may coincide with it. I developed the habit as a teenager, reading signs and automobile license plates aloud and backward when my father would take my mother, my two younger brothers, and myself for Sunday rides in his 1932 Chevrolet. I found it to be great fun. I also taught myself to read upside-down print — an equally fascinating endeavor. In later years, working with others on a daily basis, I’d occasionally talk backward in a joking manner (ekil siht). The interesting thing here was that after a while my co-workers not only came to understand what I was saying, but joined in the game.

9. Jane first came through with Sumari in her ESP class for November 23, 1971. Seth then devoted portions of the next five sessions to that development. From the 600th for December 13: “Each symbol in an alphabet stands for unutterable symbols beneath it … Sound itself, even without recognizable words, carries meaning. Oddly enough, sometimes the given meaning of the word does battle with the psychic and physical meaning of the sounds that compose it … The [Sumari] word ‘shambalina’ connotes the changing faces that the inner self adopts through its various experiences. Now this is a word that hints of relationships for which you have no word.” And from the 602nd for January 5, 1972: “In your language there are words that sound like the reality they try to represent. These are called ‘onomatopoeia’ [in English]. ‘Hush’ is an example….”