“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.”

The new word will fit as much as the old one did. It may, in fact, fit better. Do this with many objects, following the same procedure. You can instead say the name of any object backwards.⁶ In such ways you break up to some extent the automatic patterning of familiar phrases, so that you can perceive the individuality that is within each object.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

11. In Chapter 8 of Adventures, Jane used her Sumari poem, Song of the Pear Tree, to present some examples of such layered, or deeper, meanings. In one instance she first translated the Sumari line, “Le lo terume,” into “The pear tree stands.” Later she came to understand that a more literal — and evocative — meaning is “Earth grows itself into a tree and becomes standing-earth-with-pear-faces.”