[...] The last paragraph of material may give clues to human behavior today: Man kills animals — and eats them — for reasons he’s consciously forgotten. [...] One wonders whether the same reasoning might apply when man kills man….)

[...] You never see a man merge with a tree, for example. [...] Visually, early man did not perceive the physical world in the way that seems natural to you.

You will have to give us time… (Pause, one of many.) When a man’s consciousness, for example, blended with that of a tree, those data became “visual” for others to perceive. When a man’s consciousness merged with an animal’s, that blending became visual data also.

A man, wondering what a tree was like, became one, and let his own consciousness flow into the tree. Man’s consciousness mixed and merged with other kinds of consciousness with the great curiosity of love. [...]

Give us a moment … Man is himself made as much of God-stuff as earth-stuff, so in those terms now the god in himself yearned toward the man in the god, and earth experience. [...] Through various exercises in this book, I hope to acquaint each of you with the inherent oneness of the inside and outside realities, to give you a glimpse of your own infinite nature even within the bounds of your creaturehood — to help you see the god-stuff in the man-stuff. [...] But oddly enough, if that is done you will end up seeing the divinity in man.

Many have seen that inner world as the source for the physical one, but imagined that man’s purpose was merely to construct physically these perfect images to the best of his abilities. (Very forcefully:) In that picture man himself did not help create that inner world, or have any hand in its beauty. [...] Man, being a part of that inner world by reason of the nature of his own psyche, automatically has a hand in the creation of those blueprints which at another level he uses as guides.

[...] They are ideals set in the heart of man,⁵ yet in other terms he is the one who also put them there, out of the deeper knowledge of his being that straddles physical time. Existence is wise and compassionate, so in certain terms consciousness, knowing itself as man, sent future extensions of itself out into the time scheme that man would know, and lovingly planted signposts for itself to follow “later.”

4. Plato, the Greek philosopher, poet, and logician, lived from about 427 to about 347 B.C. Throughout his mature life he treated what he considered to be man’s God-given ideas in a series of Dialogues, or free conversations.

Paul also represented the militant nature of man, that had to be taken into consideration in line with man’s development at the time. That militant quality in man will completely change its nature, and be dispensed with as you know it, when the next Christ personality emerges. [...]

[...] In one sense, you can say that man identifies with the gods he has himself created. Man does not understand the magnificent quality of his own inventiveness and creative power, however. [...]

Now there will be several born before that time who in various ways will rearouse man’s expectations. One such man has already been born in India, in a small province near Calcutta, but his ministry will seem to remain comparatively local for his lifetime.

He will lead man behind the symbolism upon which religion has relied for so many centuries. He will emphasize individual spiritual experience, the expansiveness of soul, and teach man to recognize the multitudinous aspects of his own reality.

(Faster at 10:45:) The god concept then was an aid, and an important one, to man’s emerging ego. [...] On deeper levels both animal and man understand the connections. Biologically the man knows he has come from the earth. Some of his cells have been the cells of animals, and the animal knows he will look out through a man’s eyes.³ The earth venture is cooperative. [...]

(See Appendix 6 for the material on parallel man, alternate man, and probable man that Jane began dictating to me shortly after last mid-night.

(Pause.) Speaking now in those historic terms that you understand, let me say that there was no single-line development from animal to man, but parallel lines, in which for centuries animal-man and man-animal coexisted cooperatively. In the same way now, unknown amongst you, many species of what you may call probable man⁶ dwell in embryo form.

[...] Those birds, I thought, knew where they were going — they knew what they were doing, in ways man could barely comprehend. [...]

[...] Man can interpret the weather in terms of air pressure and wind currents. [...] Man’s psyche, however, is emotionally not only a part of his physical environment, but intimately connected with all of nature’s manifestations. Using the terms begun in the last chapter, I will say then that man’s emotional identification with nature is a strongly-felt reality in Framework 2. And there we must look for the answers regarding man’s relationship with nature. [...]

[...] They mix and merge the inner, unseen but felt, eternal psychic experience of man with the temporal events of his physical days, and form a combination that structures thoughts and beliefs from civilization to civilization. [...] The dreams, hopes, aspirations and fears of man interact in a constant motion that then forms the events of your world. That interaction includes not only man, of course, but the emotional reality of all earthly consciousnesses as well, from a microbe to a scholar, from a frog to a star. [...]

Give us a moment… Before we discuss man’s and woman’s private roles in the nature of mass events — no matter what they are — we must first look into the medium in which events appear concrete and real. [...]

Why is one man killed and not another? [...]

[...] Man possesses free will, but that free will operates only within man’s degree—that is, his free will is somewhat contained by the frameworks of time and space.

“By the time” that the Garden of Eden tale reached your biblical stories, the entire picture had already been seen in the light of concepts about good and evil that actually appeared, in those terms, a long time later in man’s development. The inner reincarnational structure of the human psyche is very important in man’s physical survival. [...]

The Garden of Eden story in its most basic sense refers to man’s sudden realization that now he must act within time. [...]

[...] Among a larger variety of possible actions, man was suddenly faced with a need to make choices, that within that context had not been made “before.”

[...] Many people speculate about the physical journeys of early man from one continent to another. It is said that in “the struggle to survive” man was literally driven to expand his physical boundaries.

Now: Man needs the feeling that he is progressing, but technological progress alone represents a comparatively shallow level unless it is backed up by a growth of emotional understanding—a progression of man’s sense of being at one with himself and with the rest of the natural world.

[...] First had come her reactions to a group of upsetting letters she’d received this noon: One is a 20-page missive from a mental patient who wants returned to him all of the notes, objects, manuscripts, and books of poetry he’s sent her over the years: another is from a woman who informed us that she’s writing a book dictated by Seth: a third is a long letter from a man who’s claiming us as his counterparts, for reasons we can’t agree with. [...]

[...] Your greatest achievements have been produced by civilizations during those times when man had the greatest faith in the meaningfulness of life in general, and in the meaningfulness of the individual within life’s framework.

In your terms, with time, historically, he began to lose this identification, so that an emotional separation began to occur between man and the elements, between man and the other manifestations of nature. [...] Nature became an exterior power, more of an adversary, even though man has a love for the earth, the fields, and the grain that they yielded.

When man identified with nature, as given in Psyche, he did not imagine that the gods disapproved of him when storms lashed across the landscape. [...] Instead, identifying with nature, man identified also with all of its manifestations.

[...] Man did not see himself pitted against the elements, but allied with them, whatever their mood or behavior. [...] Man could exult in nature’s energy, power, and splendor, even in the midst of the most fierce storm —in which, indeed, his life might be in danger.

With that loss of identification storms for the first time became truly threatening, capricious, for man’s mind could not intellectually understand the intimate and yet vast connections that the intuitions and emotions had once comprehended. It was then, and in the terms of this discussion, that men felt a division between themselves and “the gods,” for it was then that man began to personify the elements of nature.

PARALLEL MAN, ALTERNATE MAN, AND PROBABLE MAN: THE REFLECTION OF THESE IN THE PRESENT, PRIVATE PSYCHE.

(12:01.) Now: Section 2: “Parallel Man, Alternate Man, and Probable Man,” colon: “The Reflection of These in the Present, Private Psyche.” [...]

3. Speaking literally, because of their dissolution upon the death of their host, the man’s cells won’t become part of the animal’s structure — but at least some of the long-lived molecular components of those cells could do so, and with all their memories intact. [...]

Are laws made to protect man from the self as it is generally outlined by Freud and Darwin? Man had laws, however, far earlier. Are laws made then to protect man from his “sinful nature”? [...]

[...] Are laws made to protect man from his own cunning and chicanery? In short, are laws made to protect man from his own “basically criminal nature”?

[...] They have concentrated upon the great gaps that seem to exist between their ideals of what man should be, and their ideas of what man is.

[...] Is the law a reflection of something else — a reflection of man’s inherent search toward the ideal, and its actualization? [...]

It is not true, of course, that before the time of modern psychology man had a concept of himself that dealt with conscious exterior aspects only, although it has been written that until that time man thought of himself as a kind of flat-surfaced self — minus, for example, subconscious or unconscious complexity.

Instead, previous to psychology’s entrance, before psychology mapped the acceptable or forbidden, the dangerous or safe compartments of the self, man used the word “soul” to include his own entire complexity. That word was large enough to contain man’s experience. [...]

It was an attempt to fit man within the picture of evolution, and to manufacture a creature whose very existence was somehow pitted against itself. Evolutionary man, with Darwinian roots, could not be a creature with a soul. [...]

[...] (Long pause.) Modern psychology was an attempt to make man conform to the new scientific world view.

[...] You can say with equal validity that the body holds a man’s ghost, that it is filled also with the organs of all the animals a man has consumed—that one man has the heart of a lion, and in that framework that is true.

Early man, “stupidly” knowing nothing of the body’s organs, did not feel that particular kind of disorientation. Man has an inherent knowledge of his body. [...]

Man has a knowledge of his body. [...] Each man feels his relationship with his body. [...]

Perhaps primarily the answer lies in the necessity that man recognize the spontaneous source of his being. [...]

In civil and governmental terms, such a policy could not be tolerated—nor has man yet learned how to deal with that basic principal. It is almost automatic, for example, to label a man a murderer, and identify him with his crime. [...] Man’s great exuberant spontaneity has never been allowed its full sweep as a result.

[...] Indeed, according to the original Christ thesis, while a man could sin, no man was identified as a sinner. [...]

[...] That vitality allows for different readings, of course, and through man’s changing development he reads his myths differently, yet they serve as containers for intuitional knowledge.

[...] Instead, while carrying the belief in man’s potential, Christianity smothered the thesis beneath a slag heap of old guilt. [...]

[...] The religions do insist that man has a purpose, yet in their own confusion they often speak as if that purpose must be achieved by denying the physical body in which man has his life’s existence, or by “rising above” “gross, blunted,” earthly characteristics. [...] In both cases man’s nature, and nature in general, take short shrift.

[...] You see in such stories examples of meaningless deaths, and further proof of nature’s indifference to man. You may, on the other hand, see the vengeful hand of an angry God in such instances, where the deity once again uses nature to bring man to his knees. Man’s nature is to live and to die. [...]

(Long pause, then with much subdued irony:) In exasperation some of you see nature as good and enduring, filled with an innocence and joy, while on the other hand you envision man as a bastard species, a blight upon the face of the earth, a creature bound to do everything wrong regardless of any strong good intent. Therefore you do not trust man’s nature either.

This myth finds great value in the larger processes of nature in general, and yet sees man alone as the villain of an otherwise edifying tale. A true identification with nature, however, would show glimpses of man’s place in the context of his physical planet, and would bring to the forefront accomplishments that he has achieved almost without his knowing.

[...] There were then also animal-man and man-animal civilizations of their kinds, and there were complete civilizations of modern man, existing before the ages now given for, say, the birth of writing. [...]

[...] Man, as you think of him, shared the earth with the other creatures just mentioned. In those terms so-called modern man, with your skull structure and so forth, existed alongside of the creatures now supposed to be his ancestors. [...]

[...] (Long pause.) Many of the man-animal groups had their own communities. [...] In a manner of speaking they had the earth to themselves for many centuries, in that modern man did not compete with them.

(In the last deleted session Seth had promised us some data on early man, but I told Jane to forget that for now. [...]

Art as painting or drawing was then an important element in what you think of as man’s evolution. [...] Men dreamed their own maps in the same fashion, one man dreaming perhaps a certain portion, and several dreamers contributing their versions, drawing in sand in the waking state, or upon cave walls. [...]

[...] A man of property, whether he be a scoundrel or a fool, was first and foremost a man of worth. [...]

God made the wealthy and the poor, the privileged and the non-privileged, and therefore it was obviously up to man to continue that status quo. If a man had wanted—I am sorry: if God had wanted all men to be rich, he would have them all born in castles. [...]

(9:48.) In those previous “decadent” European centuries, a man’s or a woman’s worth was indisputably settled by the circumstances of birth. [...]

Imagine a man in an automobile who passes our man at the corner. Now when our man in the automobile reaches the tree he is further ahead, so to speak, in distance. [...] That is, the man on the corner has watched him pass by. He is beyond the man on the corner in space. The man on the corner at the same time sees the motorist drive beyond. [...]

If you will imagine the rather odd picture of a solid beam extending from the body of the man on the corner to the tree, then this may help you to think of sight as a path. This particular path exists in space for man A, who is at the corner. If man A hears the screech of brakes there is an interval of time existing between the sound and his awareness of it. [...]

[...] If you were, or if man A was blind, he would not see the tree in question. [...] Let us pretend this state of events, and let us compare the physical objects between our man and his tree to points somewhat corresponding to them in the inner world. It would be as if instead of seeing the various houses or whatever, our man instead felt them. [...]

[...] A man can smell quite a stink, even though it is not right under his nose. [...]

Instead he focuses his abilities into the matter at hand—easy enough, you might certainly say, for the spider, yet not so easy for the man. The fact is, of course, that in the most basic manner, now, the man—the natural man—possesses that fine, keen spontaneity and inner confidence. [...]

(10:05.) The natural man has a body. When you assail yourself for how you think you have handled or not handled your natural artistic abilities, then you are assailing the natural man. When you assail yourself you are assailing the natural man. [...]

The natural man, then, is a natural artist. [...] The natural man, the natural person, knows that art provides its own sense of creative power. [...]

In a sense, painting is man’s natural attempt to create an original but coherent, mental yet physical interpretation of his own reality—and by extension to create a new version of reality for his species. It is as natural for man to paint as for the spider to spin his web. [...]

Now we find an old man with failing eyesight and partial cataract in the left eye, a hint of partial paralysis on the left side. [...] The man from whom Ruburt received the letter. [...] A well-educated but misunderstood man, whose childlike tendencies are now in prominence. [...]

[...] The old man and the school of spiritualism. [...]

[...] A Bombay connection and an involvement with some brilliant work as a young man. [...]

[...] (Pause.) A father, a very old man, still living in a place that is foreign or far distant from the brothers. [...]

[...] Without that pause — in which man can remember past in the present, and envisage a future — natural guilt would have no meaning. Man would not be able to recall past acts, judge them against the present situation, or imagine the future sense of guilt that might result.

[...] The conscious options that opened as man’s mental world enlarged made it impossible to allow sufficient freedom, and yet necessary control, on a biological level alone.

[...] Any violation against nature would bring about a feeling of guilt so that when a like situation was encountered in the future, man would, in that moment of reflection, not repeat the same action.

To that extent natural guilt projected man into the future. [...]