“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.

Consciously, then, your world view is affected by the language of your culture or country. Certain sounds, inflections, and expressions, taken together, have a more or less precise meaning. The meaning is usually quite specific, and often directional. Words in a language function not only by defining what a specific object is, for example, but also by defining what it is not.⁴

(10:05.) To some extent in the dream state, you are freed of such cultural leanings. In the most effective of dreams experience is actually more direct, in that it is less limited by language concepts. Waking, you generally become familiar with your thoughts through words that are mental, automatically translating your thoughts into language. Your thoughts therefore fall, or flow, into prefabricated forms. In the dream state, however, thoughts are often experienced directly, colon: “You live” them out. You become what they are. They are projected instantly and in such a fashion. They escape the limitations that you often place upon them. That is why it is frequently difficult to remember your dreams in a verbal fashion, or squeeze them back into the expression of usual language. Period. Your language often purposely inhibits meaning.

Give us a moment … To some extent language does make the unknown known and recognizable. It sets up signposts that each person in a culture recognizes. To do this, however, it latches upon certain significances and ignores others. You might know the word for “rock” for instance. Knowing the word might actually prevent you from seeing any specific rock clearly as it is, or recognizing how it is different from all other rocks.

The play of sunlight or shadow upon any given rock may utterly escape you.⁵ You will simply pass it by under the category of “rock.” In the dream state you might find yourself sleeping on a sunwarmed rock, or climbing on icy ones. You might feel yourself encased in a rock, with your consciousness dispersed. You might have any number of different experiences involving rocks, all quite liberating. After such an experience you might look at rocks in an entirely different fashion, and see them in ways that escape your language. Rocks give forth sounds that you do not hear, for example, yet your language automatically limits your perception of what any rock is. To some extent words come between you and your direct expression. They should and can express that experience instead.

(“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.”

Part of the unknown reality, then, is hidden beneath language and the enforced pattern of accustomed words — so, for an exercise, look about your environment. Make up new, different “words” for the objects that you see about you. Pick up any object, for example. Hold it for a few seconds, feel its texture, look at its color, and spontaneously give it a new name by uttering the sounds that come into your mind. See how the sounds bring out certain aspects of the object that you may not have noticed before.

To get in direct contact with your own feelings as they are, comma, again make up your own spontaneous sounds sometimes. Your emotions often cannot be expressed clearly in terms of language, and such unpatterning can allow them to flow freely.

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.

(11:18.) Ruburt has been involved with what he calls the Sumari language (as referred to in the notes at break). This is an expression of the consciousness at a different focus. It is the native expression of a kind of experience that happens just outside of your official one-line focus of consciousness. First of all, it breaks up verbal patterning.⁹ It is composed, however, of sounds and syllables Ruburt has heard before, made up of jumbled Romance languages.¹⁰ These are “foreign” as far as he is concerned. At the same time those sounds are, in your terms, filled with the implications of antiquity, and bring up connotations of the species’ and of the psyche’s past.

(Pause.) They alter the usual physical response to meaningful sound. You may not realize it, but your language actually structures your visual perception of objects. Sumari breaks down the usual patterning, therefore, but it also releases the nervous system from its structured response to any particular stimulus. The sounds, however, while spontaneous, are not unstructured. They will present a sound equivalent of the emotion or object perceived, an equivalent that is very direct and immediate, and that bears legitimate correspondence with the object or emotion.

The English itself, however, then becomes charged, freshened with new concepts, carrying within a strangeness that itself alters the relationship of the words. This is a dream or trance language. It is as native to its level of consciousness as English is to your own — or Indian, or Chinese, or whatever. The various focuses of consciousness will have their own “languages.” Ruburt has discovered that beneath the Sumari there are deeper meanings.¹¹ He has become aware of what he calls long and short sounds. Some come so quickly that he cannot keep track, or speak them quickly enough. Others are so slow that he feels a sentence would take a week to utter.¹² These are the signatures of different focuses of consciousness as they are transposed in your space-time system.

(Pause at 11:43.) Languages express certain kinds of reality, usually by organizing experience verbally and mentally. In your case, again, a certain neurological prejudice occurs. If you experienced greater instances of out-of-body consciousness, for example, then your verbal expressions of space and time would automatically change. If you became aware of more of your dreaming experience, your language would automatically expand. Again automatically, you would also become aware of other neurological patterns than those you use. These (intently), activated, would then be picked up by your scientific instruments, and therefore change your ideas in such fields.

(Long pause.) Many people find themselves singing “gibberish” when they are alone, and trying to free themselves from language structuring. Children often play by constructing their own languages; and speaking with tongues (glossolalia) is a beautiful example of the attempt to express a reality that escapes the tyranny of overly structured words.

Music is a language. Painting is a language. The senses have a language of their own — one that seeps into structured words but dimly.

Give us a moment … Other focuses of consciousness besides your own have different concepts of time, and are actually more biologically correct, in that they have greater knowledge of both cellular and spiritual realities. There is nothing “wrong” with your present habitual kind of consciousness, any more than there is anything wrong with speaking only one language. There is within you, however, the impetus to explore, to expand, to create, and that will automatically lead you to explore inner lands of consciousness; as, in your terms, it has led you to explore the other countries of the physical world.

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.”

4. This material reminds me of Seth in the 681st session in Volume 1: “The deeper explanations, however [in this case of probabilities], demand a further expansion of ideas of consciousness … It is not so much a matter of Ruburt’s vocabulary, incidentally, since even a specialized scientific one would only present these ideas in its own distorted fashion. It is more a problem of basic language itself, as you are acquainted with it. Words do not exist, for example, for some of the ideas I hope to convey. We will at any rate begin.”

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.

Present linguistic thinking assigns the burgeoning of a “modern” language ability to late Neanderthal man, who existed across southern Europe and other lands in the Eastern Hemisphere during part of the last Ice Age glaciation (from about 70,000 to 10,000 years ago). Some 40,000 years ago, in Europe at least, Neanderthal man either evolved into or was supplanted by Cro-Magnon man (Homo sapiens sapiens) our immediate predecessor.

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.

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….”

10. Such languages would be Italian, Spanish, French, and others stemming from Vulgar Latin.