“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

That world has many languages. Physically you are like one country within your psyche, with a language of your own. People are always searching for master languages, or for one in particular out of which all others emerged. In a way, Latin is a master language. In the same manner people search for gods, or a God, out of which all psyches emerged. Here you are searching for the implied source, the unspoken, invisible “pause,” the inner organization that gives language or the self a vehicle of expression. Languages finally become archaic. Some words are entirely forgotten in one language, but spring up in altered form in another. All of the earth’s languages, however, are united because of characteristic pauses and hesitations upon which the different sounds ride.

(10:40.) Give us a moment… Using ordinary language, you speak with your fellows. You write histories and communications. Many books are meant to be read and never to be spoken aloud. Through written language, then, communication is vastly extended. In direct contact, however, you encounter not only the spoken language of another, but you are presented with the communicator’s person as well. Spoken language is embellished with smiles, frowns, or other gestures, and these add to the meaning of the spoken word.

In the same manner, when you ask: “Is there a master language?” it is apparent that you do not understand what language itself is. Otherwise you would know that language is dependent upon other implied ones; and that the two, or all of them, are themselves and yet inseparable, so closely connected that it is impossible to separate them even though your focus may be upon one language alone.

Even the alterations of obvious pauses between languages make sense only because of an implied, unstated inner rhythm. The historic gods become equally archaic. Their differences are often obvious. When you are learning a language, great mystery seems involved. When you are learning about the nature of the psyche, an even greater aura of the unknown exists. The unknown portions of the psyche and its greater horizons, therefore, have often been perceived as gods or as the greater psyches out of which the self emerged — as for example Latin is a source for the Romance languages.

[...] 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. [...] 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.

[...] 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. [...] 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. [...] Your language often purposely inhibits meaning.

In a way, the one-line kind of consciousness that you have developed can be correlated with your use of any one language. [...] 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. [...] In the same way, your one-line kind of consciousness is but one of many “languages.” [...]

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.

The listener then breaks down the language. [...] You have so connected words and images that language seems to consist of a sound that suggests an image. Yet some languages have had sounds for feelings and subjective states, and they had no subjects or predicates, nor even a sentence structure that you would recognize.

[...] I said that the language of love was the one basic language, and I mean that quite literally. [...]

Initially language had nothing to do with words, and indeed verbal language emerged only when man had lost a portion of his love, forgotten some of his identification with nature, so that he no longer understood its voice to be his also. [...]

I would like to emphasize the difficulty of explaining such a language verbally. In a way the language of love followed molecular roots — a sort of biological alphabet, though “alphabet” is far too limiting a term.

[...] You have been given a language it seems that is not a language. And since you have been given it there is a reason for it, and what earthly good is a language that is not a language? An ancient language that never was and within those paradoxes what meanings are there for you to learn? [...] And what is there about a language that has both beginnings and endings in it as you think of them, elements of a distant past and portents of what perhaps languages might be in your future? And why do you need a language beside the one that you have? [...]

Now all of you to some extent in your dream work keep records, and as such you are dealing with language as you know it, and you are interpreting your experience in terms of a mundane language that is as much a deception as it is a reflection of your feelings and experiences, for you cannot find words within your language to express your own feelings and experiences. Now, are you witnesses of the beginning of a language, the birth of a language that never existed? Are you witnesses of the reemergence of a language that was never spoken? Did it ever occur to you that there are languages that have never been verbalized, that beneath the words that you know and speak there are other sounds and other meanings that you do not approximate with the language that you know? [...]

[...] In what voices and what languages do truths come and in what packages and in what forms? [...] And you would throw them away for you would think the air cannot speak and space makes no noise, and in the silence there is no voice and no meaning and so voice and sound and language are given you. But let you remember that the language and the sound and the noise are packages that have been parceled for you, but for you personally, tailored for you exactly according to your own purposes and needs. [...]

Now you are beginning to communicate backward and trying to put aside the language that you knew and the phrases that you took for granted in order to approximate a more pure communication. One way of doing this would be to take several steps away from the language that you know to get into somewhat unfamiliar territory and to learn your way there, and then to be taken further down the primrose path where little by little the vowels and syllables themselves would disappear until you are at the pure sound and beneath that with true feeling. [...]

I use the word “cordella” to express the source out of which such languages spring. There are many correlations of course between your language and your body. Your spoken language is dependent upon your breath, and even written language is dependent upon the rapidity with which messages can leap the nerve endings. Biological cordellas then must be the source for physical languages, but the cordellas themselves arise from the psyche’s greater knowledge as it forms the physical mechanism to begin with.

I said that your language to some extent programs your experience. There is a language of the senses, however, that gives you biological perception, experience, and communication. [...] All of your written or verbal languages have to be based upon this biological “alphabet.” There is far greater leeway here than there is in any of your spoken or written languages.

[...] It is woven into your language. According to logical thought and language you may say: “I am going to a party today because I was invited last week, and said I would attend.” [...] That does not make sense in terms of logical thought or language, for in the last example cause and effect would exist simultaneously — or worse, the effect would exist before the cause.

Dreams are a language of the psyche, in which man’s nature merges in time and out of it. [...] He still has the language of the flesh, and yet that language is only opaquely connected with the body’s mechanisms. [...]

I said that languages gain their meaning largely from the pauses and hesitations between sounds. They obviously gain their meaning also because of the sounds not used, so that any one language also implies the existence of all others. To that extent, all other languages reside silently within any given spoken language. The same applies to language written upon a page. [...]

[...] You are like a living language spoken by someone who did not originate it — the language was there for you to use. The language in this case is a molecular one that speaks your physical being. The components of that language or the earth elements that form the body were already created when you were born, as the alphabet of your particular language was waiting to be used.

(10:49.) There are many languages, though most people speak one, or two, or three at most. Languages also have accents, each somewhat different while still maintaining the original integrity of any given language. To some extent you can learn to speak yourself with an accent, so to speak — say that I smiled — in which case, still being yourself, you allow yourself to take on some of the attributes of another “language.”

[...] You take your particular “language” so for granted, and use it so effortlessly, that you give no thought at all to the fact that it implies other languages also, or that it gains its meaning because of inner assumptions that are never spoken, or by the use of pauses in which no sounds are made. [...]

[...] Pause.) As I have said often, language is used as often to distort as it is to clearly communicate. There is a structure within the Sumari language, but it is not one based upon logic. [...] It is a disciplined language in that spontaneity has a far greater order than any you recognize.

In quite different terms however it is a language that is at the base of all languages, and from which all languages spring in your terms. [...]

[...] In your terms the Sumari language is not a language, since it was not spoken verbally by any particular group of people living in your history.

[...] Patterned language allows for no such surprises. The Sumari language has been used in the dream state.

In daily language, objects have certain names. [...] To do this, however, you must leave your daily language behind at least momentarily, and pay attention to your own feelings and imagination. Your language tells you that certain things are true, or facts, and that certain things are not. Many of your most vivid and moving feelings do not fit the facts of your language, so you disregard them.

Your daily language deals with separations, divisions, and distinctions. To some extent your language organizes your feelings and emotions. The language of the psyche, however, has at its command many more symbols that can be combined in many more ways, say, than mere letters of an alphabet.

These emotional experiences, however, often express the language of the psyche. It is not that an understanding of your psyche is beyond you: It is usually that you try to understand or experience it in one of the most difficult ways — through the use of daily language.

The imagination belongs to the language of the psyche. For this reason it often gives experiences that conflict with the basic assumptions upon which daily language is based. [...]

In the dream state, languages and images are wedded in a way that seems alien only because you have forgotten their great alliance. Initially, language was meant to express and release, not to define and limit. So when you dream, images and language merge often, so that each becomes an expression of the other and each fulfills the other. [...]

When you awaken, you try to squeeze the psyche’s language into terms of definition. You imagine that language and images are two different things, so you try to “put them together.” In dreams, however, you use the true ancient language of your being.

[...] In sleep you use images and languages in their pure form.

[...] To you, language means words. [...] The first language, the initial language, did not involve images or words, but dealt with a free flow of directly cognitive material.

[...] In the same way, your languages are based upon an inner knowledge of larger available communications. The “secrets” of languages are not to be found, then, in the available sounds, accents, root words or syllables, but in the rhythms between the words; the pauses and hesitations; the flow with which the words are put together, and the unsaid inferences that connect verbal and visual data.

(10:44.) To some extent it is true to say that languages emerged as you began to lose direct communication with your own experience, and with that of others. Language is therefore a substitute for direct communication. [...]

Whatever your language, you perceive trees, mountains, people, oceans. [...]

The Sumari language is a bridge, and valid in those terms. It will lead you into the use of the inner senses, away from the confining nature of pet phrases and familiar language that is already loaded with its own connotations.

The Sumari language is a language then in those terms, a method of communication. [...]

[...] A recognizable verbal pattern must of course result, but use of the language itself will break up these personal associative processes that cling to recognized language symbols.

Think in terms of impressionism and its values, then switch to the idea of a Sumari language and see the connection, and the purposes that can be served. The language is fluid. [...]

Your conscious knowledge rests upon an invisible, unspoken, psychological and physical language that provides the inner support for the communications and recognized happenings of conscious life. These inner languages are built up as cordellas, and cordellas are psychic organizational units from which, then, all alphabets are born. [...] One precludes the other, even while one implies the existence of the other, for to that degree all languages have some common roots.

(Long pause.) Now as it is possible for any one human being to speak more than one language, it is also possible for you to put physical data together in other ways than those usually used. The body is capable then of putting together different languages of reality. [...]

In a way events are like the spoken components of language, yet voiced in a living form — and not for example only sounded. [...]

[...] You deal with the psychological components of actions which you will, awake, form into the consecutive corporal “language” that results in the action of your days.

Sounds obviously existed before language. There is a pattern of sound beneath all languages, a bed of vocal communication that lies behind all language and alphabet. The vocal sounds of the Sumari language and characteristics as they are presently apparent to you will, hopefully, lead toward these clearly understood but logically unstructured sounds that are recognized by the organism and by the inner self, but ignored by the reasoning conscious mind that focuses upon the logical language.

He is not as visually oriented as you, and it will be a while before the released sounds of the Sumari language will visually appear to him as symbols. Between the two of you then, you are fairly well-equipped for what we have in mind, and all of this must be translated back, you see, in language that you can understand.

[...] In time the Sumari language will be replaced, you see, by symbols, hopefully fairly faithful representations of symbols used in some ancient manuscripts. [...]

The data was also given as I told you by speakers before the time of recognized written language. [...]

(Long pause at 9:27.) In a way, physically you are a molecular language that communicates to others, but a language with its own peculiarities, as if speaking an accepted tongue you spoke with a biological accent that carried its own flavor and meaning.

[...] In the language of the self that you speak, these encounters are like the implied pauses in your verbal language. [...]

THE PSYCHE, LANGUAGES, AND GODS

[...] We will begin the next chapter, entitled: “The Psyche, Languages, and gods” — with a small “g.”

Now you can all verbalize better in the language you know than you are doing right now, and it is good for you to put what you know into verbalized terms, so I will be around here. Use the language that you have even while you are learning a new one. [...]

[...] You are getting into some material where we compare cordellas and alphabets and that material will also tell you why we are interested in using this language at all. [...]

[...] The Sumari language is one of these. [...]

Which language do you want it in? [...]

[...] You seldom realize that the present state of your language, whatever it is, will for others someday seem to be an archaic version. [...] In your terms, language presupposes a particular kind of development of mind, and when you think of language you tie the two together.

Cellular transmission, for example, is indeed much more precise than any verbal language, communicating data so intricate that all of your languages together⁶ would fall far short of matching such complexity. [...]

[...] There is only so much that I can say, since I am using a verbal language that in itself makes a tyrant of time. This book is paced in such away, however, that if you follow it an inner language will be initiated. [...]

The answer is that your language is limited. Your verbal language — for your biological communication is quite aware of probable future events, and the body constantly maintains itself amid a maze of probabilities.

[...] Love indeed does have its own language — a basic nonverbal one with deep biological connotations. It is the initial basic language from which all others spring, for all languages’ purposes rise from those qualities natural to love’s expression — the desire to communicate, create, explore, and to join with the beloved.

“THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE.”

[...]

(10:59.) Next chapter heading: “ ‘The Language of Love.’ Images and the Birth of Words.”

[...] Because this experience is so alien to your present concepts, and because it predated language as you understand it, it is most difficult to describe.

[...] By objective I refer to the use of language, the English language, that automatically sets up its own screens of perception — as of course any language must do to some extent.

[...] This occasion signals the first appearance of the Seth material in another language, and we’re happy to note that the translator, with whom Jane exchanged just a couple of letters, did an excellent, painstaking job. The publisher, Ariston Verlag, is actually located in Geneva, Switzerland; German is one of the four national languages of that country.

[...] We hope these two editions will lead to the publication of Seth’s material in other languages.

[...] The “language” (in quotes) bridges the gap between languages. [...] The language is structured, but in such a way that it is loose enough to be highly flexible and elastic, and only tight enough to retain the sense or feeling of the kind of language you are used to.

The Sumari language itself will help Ruburt by freeing his concepts, and release him from the almost automatic process of translating data into stereotyped English terms. The thought patterns beneath various languages are different, and he has been trained in the Western tradition. [...]

At that time you acquire the language of your people, and you learn to use mental concepts in a rather specialized way, and to further designate objects more specifically. Language therefore is bound to color your native thinking processes, so that it becomes almost impossible to wonder how you thought before you learned language.

[...] Your thinking itself is its own kind of invisible language, for you think before you learn language. [...]

In the same way, beneath your conscious use of language there lies a vast inner communication, a mental system upon whose basis language must rest. [...]