“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(To Arnold.) The dream was an exquisite creative production, you see, and in a way a commentary from other layers of yourself, not only on the present state of civilization as you see it, but a commentary upon civilizations in the past so that both past and present images were transposed, one upon the other. [...]

[...] They represented culture and civilization, both as it has existed in the past, and as you see it in the future. [...]

You felt, you see, that on entering this institution or this culture or civilization, that something had been taken from you symbolized by you as the fluid that was taken from the brain. [...]

Now the past images also represented not only the past in the historical context of civilization, but the past as it applies to your own personal subconscious. [...]

You think of the beginnings or endings of civilizations, for example, marking them with specific dates. [...] I am not speaking here of discipline as punishment, but of discipline accepted by a person or a civilization in order to direct action along certain lines. [...]

People feel that they must push themselves or their civilizations along certain lines—that they must impose an order from without, since they do not trust the spontaneous order of nature. [...]

[...] There are periods in history when this happened before, and a new kind of civilization resulted. [...] The beginning period of the Egyptian civilization another, the birth of Christ another, and the beginning of the scientific age.

(11:07.) Coping became a way of life in each civilization. [...]

(“With civil, or civil rights.” [...] The whole tone of the news story about the Feinberg law and the Education Law of New York State concerns the protection of civil rights, and protection by the Constitution; but without using the constitution as a hiding place for subversives, etc. [...]

(Pause.) With civil, or civil rights. [...]

Now this leads to other adventures in which whole civilizations may be involved, for as individuals have their probable destinies, so do civilizations, nations, and inhabited planetary systems. [...]

In their own way, even atoms and molecules retain a knowledge of the forms through which they have passed, and so the individuals that compose any given civilization contain deep within themselves the inner knowledge of experiments and trials, successes and failures, in which the races have also been involved at other levels of reality. [...]

[...] Jane came out of trance quickly, but before I could even tell her how good I thought the session was, she now told me that lately she’s been picking up from Seth that animal consciousness is turned inward to form the civilization of nature, and that ours is turned outward into our physical civilizations—but that ours have to be built upon that civilization of nature. [...]

[...] There is no need here to again outline the barrage of negative cultural beliefs with which indeed your civilization has an overabundance. [...]

[...] The male aspects of Christ were the ones that Western civilization emphasized. [...]

[...] I am speaking now of mainline Western civilization. [...]

Now: Realize that for now I am emphasizing your Western civilization.

(Long pause.) Other democratic societies had existed in the past, but in them democracy was still based on one religious precept, though it might be expressed in different ways — as, for example, in the Greek city-states (in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.). The Holy Roman Empire united a civilization under one religious idea, but the true brotherhood of man can be expressed only by allowing the freedom of man’s thought under the banner of cooperation; and only this will result in the fulfillment of the species, with developments of consciousness that in your terms were latent from the beginning.

(Long pause, eyes closed.) While you believe, for example, that technology as you understand it (underlined) alone means progress, and that progress necessarily requires overriding physical manipulation of the environment that must forever continue, you will judge past civilizations in that light. [...]

[...] It was impossible to imagine civilizations built upon data that were mentally received, consciously accepted, and creatively used.⁷ Under such circumstances scientists could hardly look for precognition in cells.⁸ They did not believe it existed to begin with.

[...] Later I intend to say far more about some civilizations that, in your terms, came before your own (but see the last sentence in Note 4). Before you can understand their orientation, we will have to speak about various alternate kinds of consciousness and out-of-body experience. [...]

Dictation: We will be discussing alternate methods of orientation that consciousness can take when allied with flesh, trying to give the reader some personal experience with such altered conditions, along with a brief history of some civilizations that utilized these unofficial orientations as their predominant method of focus.

Generally, reason and intellect are then considered male qualities, and the frameworks for civilization, science, and an organized world. [...] Civilization began because of the impulse of people to be together. [...]

[...] It not only separates a man from his own intuitions and emotions to some extent, or a woman from her own intellect, but it effectively provides a civilization in which mind and heart, fact and revelation, appear completely divorced. [...]

There was a civilization, and I am writing this in my book and some of you know of it—a civilization, in your terms, in your dim past, in which a group of human beings tried to form a physical body that could not act violently and when violence was threatened the body automatically closed off from action. [...]

[...] They became so terrified of the natural earth, with its pounding rains and wind that they literally crept into the bowels of the earth and lived there feeling as triumphant, when they set up a civilization within the earth, as you will feel when you set one up outside of the earth. [...]

[...] I will have more to say on the nature of violence and the different civilizations and how they have handled it in later class sessions. [...]

It is only because civilized man has somewhat overspecialized in the use of one kind of knowledge over another that people fear the unconscious, spontaneous portions of the self. [...]

Nature and the inner nature of man are both seen to contain savage, destructive forces against which civilization and the reasoning mind must firmly stand guard.

[...] In the name of God, of course, the artifacts of civilizations have been destroyed, libraries ruined—and when such harm is done, in the name of God, then men are trained to feel no guilt. [...]

Your gods, and your ideas of a God, have always followed the contours of your consciousness, your civilizations, your prerogatives, and your values. [...]

[...] There have been countless other civilizations that have destroyed themselves in the planet’s past, and before this when another planet was approximately in earth’s position. There were however civilizations that endured, that outlasted their planet, and went elsewhere.

Now, mankind builds civilizations. [...]

[...] There have been countless other civilizations that have destroyed themselves in the planet’s past, and before this, when another planet was approximately in earth’s position. There were, however, civilizations that endured, that outlasted their planet, and went elsewhere.

Now, mankind builds civilizations. [...]

[...] They do not simply provide you with a basis for your religions, sciences, and civilizations. [...]

[...] All of your grandest civilizations have existed first in the world of dreams. [...]

[...] It seems to you that this is the result of your evolutionary progress—but there have been civilizations upon the earth that specialized in the use of many focuses of consciousness, as for example you are focused upon the use of tools.

Civilizations are literally social species. They die when they see no reason to live, yet they seed other civilizations. Your private mental states en masse bring about the mass cultural stance of your civilization. To some extent, then, the survival of your civilization is quite literally dependent upon the condition of each individual; and that condition is initially a spiritual, psychic state that gives birth to the physical organism. [...]

(Even if beta waves, then, seem to be the “official pulses” of our civilization [to use Seth’s phrase from a session that will be quoted in part below], still Jane and I wonder: When aren’t we actually in a state of altered consciousness? [...]

[...] They seem to be the official pulses of your civilization, giving precedence to official reality, but you have little idea that the psyche is inherently able to seek its conscious experience from all of the known ranges, according to the kind of experience chosen at any given “time.”

They were not only his private religious beliefs, but those of his contemporaries generally—(louder:) and the foundations upon which your present civilization was made. [...]

[...] Only a certain level is reached, however, and great care is needed in interpreting symbols that have their origin in an entirely different civilization than your own.

[...] Then from Seth, mentally, I thought, I got the information that Atlantis, as it’s come down to us in myth and story, was actually a composite of three civilizations. [...]