“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(To Warren:) Now, when you learn to communicate with the gracious ease with which those primitive people communicated, then you can call yourself civilized. You [as a member of the human species] do indeed see yourself as the supreme flower of history so far, yet when you can know what is going on clearly and concisely on the other side of Elmira, and can communicate it also, then you will be as primitive and as civilized as some of those primitive people.

(A group of us — Alex, Warren,² and others — had come over to Jane and Rob’s for a casual get-together, and also to talk about that week’s class, which seemed to be one of the “milestone” classes that happen occasionally.³ During the conversation, Alex said that the rise of literacy in the world would spread Seth’s ideas on a scale that had never previously been possible. In the discussion of “primitive” and “civilized” man that followed, Warren presented his opinion that some civilizations, such as those of Babylonia, Egypt, the Incas, and so forth, had been founded by initiate groups from Atlantis⁴ … that while “primitive” man may have had a kind of gestalt consciousness, he had no individual consciousness. As Warren made similar remarks about the development of individual consciousness through historical times to our point of civilization, Seth suddenly and unexpectedly came through loudly and forcefully:

Now, the session in the last class (see Note 3) was a combination of the most sophisticated and the most primitive, for the English words, in your terms, are understood by the proud intellect that rises above the shoulders so securely. Yet the sounds upon which those words ride are far more sophisticated than the language of which you are all so proud. For they are indeed the sounds of insects through the centuries, of stars swirling through the universe, of the blood pounding through your veins.

We consider fear an extremely primitive use of energy, as you might consider fire primitive in comparison to nuclear activity. [...]

These primitive forces are strong, binding you and not us. [...]

[...] It is also true, of course, that some primitive societies have lost large numbers of their populations to disease. [...]

[...] As a direct result, at least as many diseases develop through such procedures as would exist in a highly primitive society with unsanitary conditions. [...]

(10:10.) Even in primitive societies, witch doctors and other natural therapists have understood that the point of power is in the present, and they have utilized natural hypnosis as a method of helping other individuals to concentrate their own energy. [...]

[...] The most educated Western doctors will look with utter dismay and horror at the thought of a chicken being sacrificed in a primitive witch doctor’s hut, and yet will consider it quite scientific and inevitable that a woman sacrifice two breasts to cancer. [...]

In your time, medical men, again with great superiority, look at primitive cultures and harshly judge the villagers they think are held in the sway of witch doctors or voodooism; and yet through advertisement and organization, your doctors impress upon each individual in your culture that you must have a physical examination every six months or you will get cancer; that you must have medical insurance because you will become ill.

[...] The blacks are considered the primitives. [...]

In your society therefore the black race has represented what you think of as the chaotic, primitive, spontaneous, savage, unconscious portions of the self, the underside of the “proper American citizen.”

[...] They then began with a psychological head start as they formed new primitive groupings. [...]

[...] It was highly ingrown and dwelled upon the planet simultaneously with a large, unorganized, dispersed, primitive culture.

Studies will show that this duality is not a natural state of man, since even today many so-called primitive societies do not experience this duality to anything like the degree with which it affects more civilized communities. [...]

In many primitive communities, these communications are accepted as reality. [...]

[...] The fact is that Western man has not only cut himself off from half of his own ability, and half of his own knowledge because of his insistence upon an artificial dual nature, but he has also cut himself off from the very primitive societies from which he could learn very much about these abilities, which he himself refuses to admit.

[...] There are also references to animals in chapter five; Jane discusses these under the chapter heading “Dream Symbols and Culture” on the object, and mentions that fire helped primitive man keep the beasts away. We thought the primitive reference might have conjured up mas-todon, and that this in turn would support Seth’s “Connection with an animal” data in the 257th session. [...]

[...] Under this subject Jane discusses the symbolic and cultural meaning of fire for primitive man.

[...] They try desperately to control themselves and their environment against what seems to be a raging, spontaneous mass of primitive impulses from within, and against a mindless, chaotic, ancient force of nature. [...]

[...] Such a simple understanding did not come to me that I remember, nor to my brothers—both of whom I think still have primitive ideas concerning father especially. [...]

[...] It is against my principles, and do not be surprised that I called Ruburt a puritan for he is, a strange mixture of a complete primitive and a complete puritan, and if it were not for me he would be very solemn-faced, indeed. [...]

[...] You have not made the primitive part yet. [...]

[...] I recall no figures; the sails were a beautiful rich brown, as of woven material or leather; the design of the boat, while simple, was primitive; the water was brilliantly sparkling, the sky very blue.)

[...] Walking barefoot on a bed of fire would most likely cause most of you, my readers, to feel the most acute pain — while in some primitive societies, under certain conditions the same situation could result instead in feelings of ecstasy or joy.

[...] Hunters in primitive groups know how to hunt. [...]

[...] As I have said before, according to psychology and science, you are a living conglomeration of elements and chemicals, spawned by a universe without purpose, itself accidentally formed, and you are given a life in which all the “primitive and animalistic” drives of your evolutionary past ever lurk within you, awaiting expression and undermining your control.

The new psychology shut off mobility after death, while giving each individual an unsavory primitive past heritage — a heritage genetically carried, that led finally only to the grave. [...]

Human capabilities will be seen as what they are, and a great new period of development will occur, in which all concepts of selfhood and reality will be literally seen as “primitive superstition.” [...]

[...] There were highly developed human beings with elaborate civilizations, existing simultaneously with what you might call animal kingdoms — that is, more or less organized primeval animal tribes, possessing their own kinds of ‘primitive’ cultures.

(“Can you tell me about the dream I told Jane, concerning the primitive men?”)

[...] Science and religion each tell you that left alone you will spontaneously be primitive creatures, filled with uncontrolled lust and avarice. [...]

[...] At the fringes of my field of vision I saw that the face containing these magnificent eyes was quite hairy, covered by long black shining hair almost as though I was visualizing a throwback to more primitive man. But there was no sense of primitiveness here; these limpid brown eyes regarded me impassively; there was no intrinsic threat. [...]