Mike's commentary · The Nature of the Psyche, Chapter 6

The "Introduction" and "Key Points" of this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not things Mike said during the lecture. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the parts Mike read aloud).

Introduction

This chapter discusses the birth of language and writing: language did not originate from labor, but began with the communication of love, the desire for creation and unity. Early humans, with their fluid consciousness, directly identified with all things in nature, needing neither words nor images; later, as identification weakened, people began to perceive the world from outside through images and sounds, and spoken language, writing, and visual images became substitutes and symbols for direct communication. At the end of the chapter, the channeling experience is used to illustrate that beneath language and images there still exists a level of direct perception.

Key Points of This Chapter

• The language of love is a non-verbal language that predates spoken and written language, and all languages derive from it.
• Early humans identified directly with all things in nature through a fluid, blendable consciousness, and did not confine consciousness to the body.
• Spoken language, written words, and mental images emerged only after the identification between humans and nature weakened and things could only be viewed from the outside.
• Language is a substitute for direct communication, relying on sound, pauses, rhythm, and the unspoken parts, and it affects the body.
• Objects in vision are symbols just as words are; beneath language and images there exists a level of direct perception.

Main Text

Chapter 6: "The Language of Love," Images, and the Birth of Words (Part 1)

In the latter half of the previous session, Session 774, Seth announced the title of the next chapter: The Language of Love, Images, and the Birth of Words.

Starting with this chapter, he begins to talk about how human language and words came into being. It is truly wondrous. The emergence and birth of human language is not at all like what we learned from books or from the textbooks we once had.

First of all, people in love can communicate without words. This is already a commonplace, something everyone knows. Two people who love each other can reach that kind of unspoken understanding without language. A single glance is enough to understand, just as we often joke: after confirming the look in each other's eyes, the look is right.

He says that all kinds of plays and stories have depicted that kind of inner communication that seems to occur between mother and child, between brothers, between sisters, or between lovers, communication that transcends language and does not require words.

Love itself seems to quicken these sensations between bodies, and the senses become sharper. Therefore, even the slightest gesture takes on extraordinary importance and meaning. In a state filled with the emotion of love, whether it is the love between mother and child or the love between lovers, it is like this. When a mother looks at her little child, whether it is a newborn baby or a child who has grown up, she can see in the child's subtle changes, in every movement, a special significance. A small child cannot speak, but if you are a mother, you should know what the child wants right now, whether it is thirsty or hungry. This kind of thing is extremely subtle.

In myths and legends, lovers do not need language. Even if one person dies and the other remains alive, they can still communicate. Even if one person goes to another world, they can still communicate. Here I must mention The Peony Pavilion¹ again. There are many depictions of this in it. It is a play and also a legend, very typical: a person dies, and yet they can still meet in dreams.

He says that the experience of love deepens the joy of that moment. In myths and legends, although one person has passed away and the other still lives in the world, that brief moment of love they once shared also seems to emphasize the brevity of life. Because one person has died, it actually emphasizes the impermanence and brevity of life, and love itself is also brief. But the expression of love illuminates the moments of life with incomparable brilliance. Although love is brief, it illuminates your entire life like a light of incomparable brilliance. And the brilliance of that moment contains within it an intensity. What kind of intensity? It transcends time. Love possesses eternity, and the moment possesses eternity.

He wants to derive from love the idea that the birth of language came out of love.

In your world, you identify only with yourself. Yet love can expand that identification to such a degree that the intimate perception of another person becomes an important part of your own consciousness.

In your world, you are the only one. You identify only with yourself. Everyone else is a supporting character, and you are the protagonist. But because of love, this identification is expanded: you begin to pay attention to the person you love, and your world is no longer just one person; it becomes two people. The person you love also becomes the focus, the center of gravity of your world, and sometimes even more important than yourself, even surpassing you. Because that beloved is too important in your life, their every movement, their joys and sorrows, all become a very important part of your consciousness, unlike the joys and sorrows of ordinary people, which do not matter to you at all. But this beloved is different. Their every movement, their headaches and fevers, their thoughts, all sway your consciousness.

You look outward at the world, not only through your own eyes, but at least to some degree, also through the eyes of another person.

When he and she, a man and a woman, when their spaces are separated from each other, it is true to say that a part of you symbolically travels with this other person. Two people in love each see the world through the other's eyes: he sees the world with his own eyes, and also with the other's eyes. What does it mean to see the world through the other's eyes? It means that the person you love, their perception and feeling of this world, will influence you. How they view a person, how they view a matter, because the two of you are in love, your intimate attention to them will cause their view and perception of the world to influence you, as if you are perceiving the world through them. You are simultaneously seeing the world through two pairs of eyes, your own and theirs.

If we put it this way, for example, the two of you each go to your workplaces during the day, and when you are not together, if we speak symbolically, you and they are traveling together. This can also be considered a true statement, because you are seeing the world through their eyes, and they are seeing the world through yours.

All of this, to varying degrees, also applies to animals. Even within animal groups, the individual is not concerned only with its own survival. Each animal is not only concerned with its own survival; they are also concerned with the survival of their family members. I saw a video earlier, I forget where, on YouTube or Douyin, of a little deer crossing a river. It jumped into the river and swam toward the opposite bank, not seeing that an enormous crocodile was already lying in ambush in the river. When it jumped into the river and swam toward the other side, the crocodile swam toward it from the bank. At that moment, from a distance, what must have been its mother, a slightly larger deer, leaped from the bank into the river at incredible speed, swimming rapidly toward the fawn, and placed herself directly between the crocodile and the fawn, and then let the crocodile eat her. The little deer, in great terror, leaped onto the shore, and by then its mother had already been eaten by the crocodile. I think many people have seen this video. That such a thing can happen in the animal world shows that animals are actually the same; they also care about their family members.

Within an animal group, every individual is aware of the conditions of the others. They all know what state the others are in. Therefore, the expression of love is not limited to you humans. Not only humans have love; animals have it too. The example I just gave, you could call it maternal love, and that love is the same as the radiance of human maternal love. Gentleness, loyalty, and concern are not qualities that only humans possess; animals have them too.

Love indeed has its own language, a basic non-verbal language.

The language of love transcends language. It is not through words, not through writing. Love carries a deep biological connotation. It is not just something abstract on the level of language; it carries more of a biological connotation, existing beyond language. It is the most basic, the original language. Human language was born out of this language of love, emerged from it, and all other languages derive from it.

Why talk about the language of love here? Because the purpose of all language arises from those qualities that are unnatural in terms of the expression of love:

The need to communicate, the need to create, the need to explore, and the desire to be united with the beloved.

Love needs to be expressed. Its natural part is the biological connotation. But beyond this biological connotation, it also seeks some unnatural expressions: the need to communicate, the need to create, the need to explore, and the desire to be united with the beloved. All of this transcends that most primitive biological connotation, and all of this requires language. In order to express these things, that is, this supernatural expression of love, humans invented what we later came to know as language. This is how human language was born.

This is different from what we thought. Traditional human history or human archaeology holds that language was produced by labor: language came into being over long periods of labor, because people needed language for labor. That is far too forced.

In your terms, humans first identified with nature, loving it, because they saw nature as an extension of themselves.

They felt that nature was a part of themselves, an extension of themselves. At the same time, they could also feel that they themselves were a part of nature's expression. In exploring nature, they were also exploring themselves, because there was no difference between them and nature. Nature was a part of them, and they were a part of nature.

They did not identify only with themselves, but because of their love, they also identified with all those parts of nature that they encountered and came into contact with.

The humans of that time not only identified with themselves, but also identified with all the parts of nature they encountered and came into contact with, because they felt that all of it was their extension and expansion, that they and nature were without difference, each being the other. Because they loved themselves, they also loved everything in nature. Everything they encountered, they loved. Their love for nature was a fundamental root of the birth of language.

This love was biologically innate.

Even now, biologically speaking, this is still a pertinent statement. He says that human love for nature is innate. Even in this present age, if we study it from a biological standpoint, it is still an objective, pertinent statement, not an artistic description or an exaggerated one. Our love of nature is innate; it does not require special emphasis or cultivation.

Physically and physiologically, humans are connected with all of nature.

Whether physically, psychologically, or physiologically, we are all connected with nature.

Humans did not live in terror, as is now supposed.

We modern people always feel that nature is terrifying, but the original humans were not like that. But neither did they live in an idealized natural paradise.

Humans lived on an intense crest of their spiritual and biological experience.

That is, they lived on an intense crest of their own spirituality and their biological experience, that is, their physical experience. By "crest," he means a peak of mutual stimulation and mutual response, with a kind of creative excitement. Put in that way, it refers to something that existed only when humans were still a new race, a new species.

He uses the phrase "put in that way" here, meaning that the premise of his statement is from this angle. At this point, he is already acknowledging human temporality, that is, from the angle of the developmental history of humanity in the three-dimensional world. If you look at it from the spiritual angle, there is no concept of time at all. But from the angle of human developmental history, this creative excitement existed only when humans first came into being as a new species.

These concepts themselves exist beyond words, beyond language. Some of them seem contradictory, and that is inevitable, because he cannot describe them in language. If he insists on describing them, there will inevitably be contradictions.

Compared with that era, children today are born ancient. Compared with the remote antiquity of humanity, children today are born very ancient. Because even biologically speaking, they carry the genes of their ancestors. Every child, at birth, carries in every cell the memory of the entire development of human civilization and history. The memory bank of human ancestors exists in the cells of every newborn. From this angle, every newborn is very ancient, because it encompasses everything.

But at the very beginning, he is now talking about how language was born, so he returns to the primitive era. At that time, put in that way:

Humanity itself rose out of a timeless womb and entered into time.

This sentence is one he seems to have held back for a long time before coming up with, trying to help you understand how humanity was born. According to this way of putting it, in that primitive era, humanity as a whole, the entire human species, rose out of a womb without time and entered into a world with time. That timeless era gestated the development of humanity. After humanity was born, humans perceived the existence of time. So he says that humanity was born out of a timeless womb and entered into a world that has time.

In deeper terms, the existence of humanity still continues. Those humans of remote antiquity still continue, sending out branches in all directions. They develop within the history that humans understand.

The person you know is only one of them.

We humans of the present are only one branch among many. Humanity has actually taken many paths that you do not yet know. There are many branches we do not know at all; we only know our own branch. The other branches are not recorded in our human history; only our own branch is recorded.

Fresh creativity still comes from that point.

That is, from the very beginning point, before humanity had branched out, before it had gone off to explore different paths. You see, he uses a long pause here, one of many long pauses, because when Seth gets to this point, he does not know how to describe it either.

From that point onward, using a method of calculation that you can accept, the humans of that period are called infant humanity.

They obviously experienced themselves differently from your own way.

Dividing time in this way, the humans of early infancy experienced the world, including the way they experienced humanity itself, differently from us now. It must have been clearly different. So you will find that the humans of remote antiquity had many brilliant cultures that we in later times could never attain, whether in ancient China or in the West; this characteristic is present in both.

Because this experience is so foreign to your present concepts. The way ancient humans perceived nature and the self is something we cannot understand now. For example, how did ancient people discover the meridians? How did they know about these acupuncture points? Without any instruments, how could they perceive these things so accurately? And these things happened before what you call language, so it is even harder to describe. It existed before language came into being, so how can you use language to describe it?

Generally speaking, you experience yourself as separate from nature, and you are mainly enclosed beneath your skin.

This is our normal human experience. But early humans did not feel as though they were an empty shell.

Yet to themselves, they existed as much outside the body as within it.

Early humans did not think that they existed only within the flesh enclosed by skin. They felt that they were much more than that. The physical body was only a part of them, and they had still more parts outside the body. This perception is completely different from that of present-day humans. In ancient times, in remote antiquity, humans believed that one part of their own being was inside the body and another part was outside the body. These two parts interacted with each other and were one, but they were divided into two parts.

Such a person could identify with a tree, for example. It is easy to say this, but to try to explain it... To say that a mother became so much a part of the tree under which her children played that she could watch over them from the tree's viewpoint, even though she herself was far away, is an entirely different matter.

I can say that a person can identify with a tree. By "identify," I mean that they can become a part of the tree, that the tree's consciousness can enter their consciousness. It is easy for me to say this, but explaining it is difficult.

For example, a mother is with a group of children playing under a tree, but she has to go elsewhere to work, say, to work in the fields. Yet she does not feel at ease leaving the children under the tree. What can she do at such a time? She can merge with the consciousness of the tree, and from the tree's viewpoint, the tree's perspective, and the tree's perception, watch over these children, as if she could see them. In this way, she can go elsewhere to do other things, not nearby. If the children encounter danger or an accident, the mother perceives it at once and hurries back. This is easy to say, but when I explain it to you like this, it is not so easy to explain.

This is actually the first of the inner senses, inner vibrational touch, which has this ability.

Consciousness is far more mobile than you realize.

From an operational standpoint, you mainly focus your consciousness on your body. This is the normal state for ordinary people. But consciousness has greater mobility. Consciousness can flow out of the body.

You cannot experience subjective actions from the outside.

Because you pour the focus of your consciousness entirely into the body itself, you can only feel the external world from within the body, by means of your body. In other words, you cannot detach your consciousness from your body. You cannot perceive the world from outside your body. You have only this one viewpoint, this one way of perceiving.

But he says that is not actually the case. For example, in the exercises we did in Seth Speaks, the first exercise is about how to move your consciousness away from your body, take a step to the side, and practice from a side angle. I saw one person whose practice method was very effective: he sat on a sofa, and beside the sofa there was a floor lamp, positioned above and to the left of his head. When he closed his eyes and meditated, he imagined placing his consciousness on that lamp, as if he were standing from the lamp's angle looking at himself. He used this method to practice entering the A-1 level. But I am digressing; let us come back.

This consciousness can flow naturally.

Consciousness can flow naturally; it does not have to stay inside your body. This flow of consciousness is something you are not aware of; you cannot see it. Animals, however, have retained it. Animals can feel that their consciousness is not only within their bodies.

You like to think in terms of units and definitions.

We humans always think in terms of units, capacity, volume, speed. So even when you consider your own consciousness, you think of it as a thing, a unit, a cell, some invisible object, as if you could hold an invisible consciousness in a pair of invisible hands.

But consciousness is not like that. It is a special quality of existence, different from all the qualities of the material world that you understand. What qualities does it have?

Every part of it contains the whole.

No matter how small it is, no matter how finely you divide it, any part contains the whole. This is a statement that surpasses human wisdom, something we humans cannot understand. Actually, Buddhism said this long ago: one flower, one world; within a single grain of sand there is a world². The Buddha often used the sands of the Ganges as an example: every grain of sand in the Ganges is a world³. Besides saying that the worlds are many, these examples also hint at another point: every part contains the whole.

Therefore, at least theoretically, consciousness can be both inside your body and outside your body at the same time. This in itself is not contradictory. Because consciousness is not the kind of intangible thing or invisible object you understand; it cannot be measured by human units of measurement.

You are seldom aware of this.

You do not feel this kind of experience, because you do not believe it is possible. Just as we repeatedly emphasized in The Nature of Personal Reality: what you experience is what you believe. Whatever your belief system believes, your world presents. It is like a filtering sieve: whatever it filters, you see. Your belief system is like polarized light: whatever image it polarizes out, you see that light, you see that image. And what your belief system does not accept, does not approve of, you simply cannot see or experience. Because you do not believe that this consciousness can be both here and there, you cannot experience it.

And it seems as though consciousness must be either here or there, and cannot be there, especially when we personalize it, humanize it, we say that this consciousness is either here or there, and we cannot understand that consciousness is both here and there. But simultaneous existence is very normal.

In the simplest terms, certainly.

He cannot explain it to you in more detail or more thoroughly.

A bird, for example, can have a nest, though it often leaves its nest, and would never confuse itself with the place of its nest. In a certain fashion, that is your situation, although the body is far more alive than a nest.

He gives a vivid example: your human body is like a bird's nest. A bird flies around for a long time to build a nest, but during the day it often flies out, and only returns to the nest at night. It would never confuse itself with its nest, never say, "I am this nest." The nest is just a place where it comes back to rest at night. You are you, and the bird is the bird. Humans are the same: the body is this nest. Although compared with a bird's nest, the body is more alive, like a living thing, the nature is the same. Consciousness is like the bird inside the body; it can fly everywhere.

But he says this is a metaphor. Is this metaphor correct? It can only be said to be incorrect. The correct way to say it is: although the bird has flown away, it is still inside the nest.

In those earlier periods, consciousness was more mobile, and identity was more democratic.

He is talking about the remote antiquity, the initial period of humanity.

And in a strange way, this does not mean that the individual was weaker. On the contrary, they were able to be strong and to accept many varied experiences within their range.

The consciousness of ancient humans was very active. It could attach itself to trees, plants, wild animals, even vegetation. They did not only look out at the world from within their bodies; part of their consciousness was inside the body, and part was outside. This does not mean, as you might think, that humans at that time were very weak. On the contrary, the consciousness of humans at that time was even stronger than it is now.

Thus, a person, looking outward into the world of trees, water, rocks, wild animals, and plants, truly felt that they were seeing the larger materialized subjective...

When humans explored the external world of nature, they were actually exploring inward. Because this external world is materialized and subjective, but it is actually the external reflection of the inner human nature: a larger materialized version of the human self. Nature is actually a materialized version of the human self. When humans explored nature, they were exploring their inner world. Exploring the outer world was exploring the inner world.

Such a person, walking through the woods, also felt that they were every rock, or a part of the inner life of every tree.

They walked through a forest and felt that they were every rock, and also felt that they were every tree, and a part of the inner life of that tree. This kind of perception can now only be felt by humans who have opened the inner senses, whereas the humans of remote antiquity used the inner senses far more than we do now.

In practical terms, however, there was no contradiction of identity.

When they became a tree, there was no contradiction with their human identity. It is not that once they became a tree they could no longer be human. They were both human and that tree. This kind of identification is very wondrous, beyond what language can describe.

A person could merge their own consciousness with a rushing river, and in this way travel for miles, exploring the shape of the land.

In remote antiquity, people could merge themselves with a river or a stream, and rush onward with the river's water, so they could sense the rise and fall of the terrain, its direction, whether there were cliffs, the surrounding scenery. This feeling was like creating a duplicate of themselves. They merged with the water, and the water merged with them. There was no contradiction of identity in this.

You can easily imagine atoms and molecules forming objects, and in the same way, consciousness, in portions with identity, can mix and form alliances.

Since you know that molecules and atoms can form objects, but this does not hinder or affect the original properties of the molecules and atoms, the molecule is still that molecule, the atom is still that atom, but when they combine they become a new substance, and this new substance does not deny their original individual properties. Consciousness is the same: the consciousness of a tree or the consciousness of water can combine with human consciousness to form a new mixed consciousness, but this does not prevent water's consciousness from being water's consciousness, or human consciousness from being human consciousness. They are each themselves, but they can also form a new alliance. Call it an alliance, or call it a mixed consciousness; either is fine.

The Birth of Language: From Identification with Nature to Losing That Identification

This section is Session 776, a session that began on Monday, May 17, 1976, at 9:14 p.m. Session 775 was skipped in between; that session has nothing to do with the book. Seth used the idea of consciousness strands to explain why Jane was able to receive material from William James—that early American philosopher and psychologist—and he discussed this in his book The Politics of Consciousness⁴. Every so often, Jane would feel as though she could get more material and information from James, although nothing further came afterward.

In Session 776, Seth began speaking about content related to this book.

He said, first of all, there are channels of interrelationship connecting all matter, and consciousness flows through these channels. Right from the start he pointed out the key point of this session: all things are connected. Their connection is a connection through which consciousness can flow between them—all things have consciousness, and the consciousness of all things can flow between them. Consciousness is not, as you might think, something that settles inside an object and stays there motionless; it can flow back and forth between them.

In the terms he was using at that time, humanity's identification with nature allowed people to make use of those inner channels—the channels we cannot see, the channels between matter and matter, the channels between people and nature. A person could let his consciousness swim through many currents and merge into their consciousness, merge into the consciousness of water. A basic language of language—he said it was a most basic language. What language was that? It was this kind of communication between consciousness and consciousness, the most basic language. Humanity identified with nature and with many of its parts, and this identification meant being able to merge with consciousness. People joined with the power of the other parts of nature, and through his identification with power, with the power of the other parts of nature, he strengthened his own sense of existence.

To put it plainly, people could link with the four great elements in nature—wind, water, earth, and fire—could all be connected with them, could all use their power, could all join with their consciousness. This ability was something people had in ancient times. It was not that he personified or anthropomorphized the elements of nature—not that kind of "man like the wind" personification—but rather that he threw himself into the elements of nature to ride them, to master them, to be together with them. It is like a person riding on horseback: if he rides very well, person and horse are one, person and horse united. Basically, if you have ridden a horse, or if you are very skilled at riding, you can feel that wherever you want to go, your intention or your consciousness, the horse can grasp it. It is like people say, wherever you look, the horse goes—very interesting. Of course, it also requires some riding skill; later, when you reach the state of person and horse as one, it is simply like a fish in water.

As mentioned earlier, love gave rise to the desire to know. Love is the root of this question. The love here does not refer only to love between men and women, but also to the love between people and the natural world. People love this nature, because they feel that they themselves are part of nature, and nature is also an extension of themselves. So when they perceived it this way, they loved themselves, and of course they also loved nature. Because this love is the root of the question, love set out his desire to know, to explore, and to communicate with the beloved—this is a foundation. Therefore, when people tried to express this love for the natural world, language began. How did language come about? It came about this way. He wanted to explore, communicate, and exchange with the beloved; this kind of primal desire gave rise to language.

In the beginning, language had little to do with words.

Session 776

Indeed, spoken language only appeared when man had lost a part of his love, yet had forgotten something of his natural identification with nature, to the point that he no longer understood the voice of nature—which was also his voice.

In those ancient days, man possessed a vast range of activity for expressing his emotions. For example, he did not symbolically rage along with the storm; rather, he very consciously identified with it—identification meaning that his consciousness could merge with the consciousness of the storm, to such a degree that he and his people became one with the wind and the lightning. And love was part of the storm's power. The storm looked very dangerous and fierce, but actually there was love contained within the storm. They felt and also knew that the storm would refresh the land; no matter how angry it seemed, the storm was useful to nature. Nature needed the storm, and the storm could be considered a cleansing, a washing of the natural world.

What is he trying to say in this passage? When man first used his own consciousness to merge with the various parts of nature, to make use of nature's power, to borrow their strength to develop himself, then in the later period, this love for nature needed to be expressed, needed to be voiced. But as man developed later on, man lost a part of his love. How did he lose it? Because as humanity developed further, man's ego consciousness gradually grew stronger. Beginning with his ego consciousness, man forgot his sense of identification with nature. He felt that he and nature had separated, that there was a sense of estrangement, that nature and he were no longer one. When he had this kind of perception, when he had this feeling of not being one with nature, he forgot his love for nature. So he needed to express it.

Why did he not need to express it at the beginning? At the beginning, his consciousness could merge with the consciousness of all the parts of nature, so of course he did not need language—language was superfluous. But when he had this barrier, this separation from nature, he needed language. Because he discovered the voice of nature. If it had been at the very beginning, he would have felt that the voice of nature was his own voice—the sound of the wind howling in nature, the sound of the storm, that sound of heavenly music, was the voice of man. Because he felt he and nature were one. When he discovered that he and nature were not one, when he no longer had this sense of identification, he no longer believed that all the sounds of nature were his own voice. So he needed to make his own voice, and only then did human spoken language come into being, only then did human language arise. Why was it not needed before? Because he felt that all the sounds nature made were the sounds he wanted to make, were his own voice, because he and nature were one.

Take the example of thunder and lightning, of the storm. At the very beginning, they identified with the storm; they were one with the wind, the lightning, and the rain within the storm. And love was also one of the storm's powers, because the storm would also wash nature clean, bringing cleanliness and freshness to nature, and also bringing new life, bringing opportunity. So they did not consider the storm to be angry.

This identification with nature is the same as the fact that the experience you understand as death was not regarded as an ending.

Because of this identification with nature, he did not consider death to be an ending, because nature is endlessly generative. The fluidity of consciousness was an experienced fact. Consciousness could flow, so the death of the physical body became unimportant to him—your body could go into the water, into the trees, into the flowers, into other animals, so this physical body was not that important either. When the body died, consciousness simply moved into the next body, and that was that. So people at that time did not consider themselves trapped within the flesh.

The body, then, was considered somewhat like a friendly home or cave.

He regarded the human body as a home, like the bird's nest mentioned in the earlier example, or like the cave where humans took shelter. The soul or consciousness found itself a refuge, which was this body, and he treated it as a home and a cave. But he did not restrict it. This home and refuge could not restrict his consciousness, could not restrict his soul.

Viewing the World from Outside the Image: The Birth of Language

This passage is actually not easy to explain, and this whole part is not easy to explain. Because it involves how language came into being, how writing came into being -- he is trying to use language and writing to describe how they came into being before language and writing existed. This matter itself is extremely strange and not easy to understand. You can see that Seth himself wants to make it clear, but it really is very difficult.

The language of love initially did not involve images either. He says that at the very beginning, this language of love had nothing to do with images. Humans believe that it was because we saw external images that we developed pictographic writing, and that the birth of writing came from images. Seth denies this right at the start -- no, the earliest birth of human language had nothing to do with images; it did not involve images.

Only when man once again lost a part of his love and identification, and forgot how to identify with an image from its inside, and therefore began to look at nature from the outside, did the images in the psyche, as they were involved with and understood, appear in their present form.

To put it more bluntly, it is only when we can no longer communicate directly with the consciousness of a tree that we begin to deal with the external image of the tree, and only then does an image of the tree appear in our minds. Before this, if we could deal directly with the consciousness of the tree itself, what you would see would not be the external image of this tree; what you would see would be the consciousness of this tree and all of its history and past, all of its experience from birth to death. Once you have truly opened the inner senses, when you look at this tree again, the feeling is completely different. But when you do not have this ability, when humanity has lost this ability, then you can only understand the tree from the outside, and there is no other way. It is only at this point that we invest it with its image.

He says he wishes to emphasize -- he emphasizes once more -- that trying to explain such a language through oral description is very difficult. He just hopes everyone can understand.

In certain terms, the language of love followed molecular roots -- a biologic alphabet, though "alphabet" is far too limiting a term.

What does this mean? The language of love follows molecular roots. Just as molecules can combine to form all other living things, the language of love follows the same principle. We can regard it as a kind of alphabet within living things. Language and writing are composed of letters, just as molecules can compose all things in the world, and these letters can also compose language. He says that this language of love is formed in the same way that molecules compose all things, just as letters compose writing, except that these letters are a biologic alphabet -- remember this clearly, it is a biologic alphabet, and he will explain why below. Although using the word "alphabet" is a word he has no choice but to use, because as soon as you say "alphabet," there are many limitations.

I think this session is especially suited for linguists, for scientists who study how human language formed, to research. If they were to conduct research based on this, I think they could obtain countless scientific advances and achieve rapid development.

Each natural element has its own key system.

Every important core element in nature has its own key system, by which it interconnects with other elements and forms a channel. Wasn't it said at the very beginning of this session that there are such channels between matter and matter, and that these channels allow consciousness to flow through them? Through these channels, consciousness can flow from one life to another, or from one kind of life to another kind of life.

Man, then, understood himself to be a separate entity, but one connected to all of nature.

What does "a separate entity" mean? It means that man understands that he has a certain separateness from nature. Man was born from nature and is a part of nature, and nature is also an extension of man, and also a part of man. Do not forget that nature is also a reflection of man's inner world; all the external material world of nature is a reflection of man's inner world. This point was already explained very thoroughly in the example of the painter and the painting given at the end of The Magical Approach, so I will not go back over it here. Between the painted and the painter, there is separateness -- that is discussing its separateness. But if you want to discuss its oneness, then the painter himself is also within the painting, and that is oneness. So its separateness and its oneness are unified together.

In spiritual learning, you must never be overly rigid about things. Truth can only emerge from two completely opposing theories, which we call paradoxes. You must never say, how can this be contradictory -- yes, it is contradictory, and that is correct. If it were not contradictory, if it spoke with perfect coherence, made complete sense, and was explained very clearly from a logical standpoint, with not a single point of contradiction, then it would often be wrong. What is called science is often like this: it seems to have no contradiction at all, it is very logical, but it is wrong. Yet in these seemingly contradictory things, the truth actually lies within.

Thus, his subjective life, his emotional reach, extended beyond what you think of as private experience. He transcended human personal experience; he considered issues from the perspective of nature and humanity.

Each person, for example, participated completely in a storm, and yet participated in his or her own individual way.

It is like what we often say: when an avalanche happens, no single snowflake is innocent -- can you say which snowflake ultimately caused this avalanche? It is very hard to say clearly; all the snowflakes participated in this avalanche. Each person's way of participating in this storm is his or her own unique personal experience. Yet the grandeur of the emotions was allowed full sway, and the seasons of the earth and the world were felt in common. What does it mean to participate in a storm? It is not that you are here watching the storm; it is that you and the storm become one, you merge with the consciousness of the storm, you are the storm, and the storm is you. If you go to a very remote or very desolate place, when a storm arrives, and you stand outside alone feeling the storm, you can feel the power and force of this storm, and that kind of interaction with nature. If your spirituality is strong enough, you can merge into oneness with the storm.

The closest approximation to the methods of language and communication is direct cognition, rather than indirect cognition.

Direct cognition is dependent upon a lover's kind of identification.

Just like two people in love: with a single meeting of the eyes, they can understand what is in each other's hearts. This is direct cognition. This requires that you and the object you wish to cognize have a sense of identification like that between lovers -- you are him, he is you, you are a part of him, and he is a part of you. At this point, you have this kind of direct cognition. The most core and most fitting description of language and communication is direct cognition; language all comes from this.

In that condition, knowing was knowing.

That is, in that condition of love, when both have become parts of each other, then this kind of knowing is instant understanding. Between you and him, there is no need for communication, no need for words, no need to describe or depict what I am feeling right now -- none of that is needed. You can feel each other directly. You surely know this feeling; you just have not carefully distinguished it. When you and the person you love most go through experiences together, go out, go on dates, go eat together, when he has a strong feeling or sensation, can you not also feel it instantly? You can feel his joy, his happiness, and even when he is unhappy, that sadness -- you can feel it too. It is that thing which transcends description by words and language. At that stage, there is no need for words, and even no need for images to depict anything. There is no need; two people are instantly in sync.

I Observe This Tree: You Are the Tree, the Tree Is You

The wind outside and the breath feel like one. The wind in nature, the air, and our breath -- we can regard them as one.

The wind, therefore, is the breath of the earth, it rises from the mouths of living beings, it spreads across the body of the earth. A part of man goes out with that breath, and so man's consciousness can travel to the places the wind fulfills. A person's consciousness travels with the wind and becomes part of all places.

This is a very poetic sentence. In ancient times, human beings and nature were one. The breath you exhale and the wind in nature are like the earth's breathing. Your breath comes from this atmosphere, from this air, and it returns to this air. When you merge with the wind, this breath of yours becomes part of the wind, and it goes with the wind. Wherever the wind reaches is where your consciousness can reach.

Here I want to give an example, something Teacher Yang Ning once talked about. Someone asked Teacher Yang Ning, when you sit in meditation, do you visualize yourself as a tree, or as a stone, sitting there unmoving? Teacher Yang Ning's point was, why do you have to think of yourself as a tree, or as a stone sitting there motionless? Why can't you think of yourself as a gust of wind? Why not think that you are that wind, passing through canyons, through forests, through the earth, through all things, formless and shapeless -- this is the state you should be in. Not like a stone squatting there motionless, or like a big tree standing there unmoving. It is the same idea as Su Dongpo's story of "unmoved by the eight winds, one fart sends him across the river⁵." Don't cultivate that state of unmoving stillness; cultivate the state of riding the wind. You are the wind, not the stone. What he emphasizes here is the fluidity of consciousness -- why use wind as an example? Because wind and water are examples we often use for the fluidity of consciousness.

He uses this as an example. He says when discussing how language was born, at that time people said "I observe this tree." If the earliest humans had written language -- at that time there was no writing -- suppose there had been writing then, how should this sentence have been expressed?

As a tree, I observe myself.

When you say "I observe this tree," the correct expression in ancient times would have been: I am this tree, I come to observe myself. Not that I stand outside, I am me and the tree is the tree, and I observe the tree. No, it is that I am the tree.

Or to put it another way:

I adopted our tree-ness, and I rested in my shade.

This "our" is used very deliberately -- it means me and the tree together, or me and nature. Here he regards himself and all things as one, which is why he uses "our." Since I am all things, since I am one with nature, then within my nature, within all my attributes, there must be the nature of the tree. So I adopt my tree-nature, and I can use the nature of the tree to feel this tree. That is, I tune my frequency to the state of the tree. So he says "I adopted our tree-ness."

And then he uses the singular "I." I used our tree-ness, and then I return to the individual: I rested in my shade. When I adopt my tree-nature, I am this tree, so what is "my shade"? It is the shade of this tree, beneath the great tree. I rest beneath my great tree. Do I still need to observe this tree? I am this tree, so what is there to observe? When I bring out my tree-nature, I no longer need to observe -- I am the tree, so why observe the tree-nature? I only need to rest beneath this tree of mine. This is the best understanding of tree-nature. So these words themselves carry very deep meaning.

A person did not stand on the shore looking down at the water, but immersed his consciousness in it.

Humanity's earliest curiosity did not involve seeing, feeling, and touching the essence of objects, but was more involved in a joyful exploration of the psyche. Humanity's earliest curiosity was not concerned with the external, superficial ways of understanding nature that we humans now have. In ancient times, when humans explored nature, they were not attracted by the exotic flowers and plants, the birdsong and fragrance of the outside world -- they were attracted by what lay behind the exotic flowers and plants and the birdsong and fragrance: the inner thing produced by them, that is, their inner consciousness. All matter is produced from consciousness, and they directly contacted these things, were curious about them -- not about the external images we imagine.

In which, it can be said, he not only put his foot in the water, but also put his consciousness into the water. Though he did both.

When a person looked at water, he did not merely see the shape of the water, the current, the clarity -- he did not look at that. He directly looked at the consciousness within the water, and then he put his own consciousness into the water's consciousness as well, and put his foot in the water too. He perceived it in both ways at once, so he says he did both.

If I speak of that language as being spoken -- if we use our mouths to speak -- a person would never say "water flows through the valley." Instead, our sentences would read something like this:

My water-self rushed toward the rocks, flowing together with the slippery others.

He has already transformed into water. The water has become his, he is one with the water. The water is me, my self rushed toward the rocks, with the others -- the others being the water around him, because at this point he has the consciousness of water, so the water around him, is it not also "people" like him -- flowing together, slippery, flowing together. He says even this description is not the best, because he still cannot reach the state he is satisfied with.

For example, he graciously thanked the tree for its shelter.

He does not designate his own consciousness as the only kind -- he knows there is also the consciousness of trees, the consciousness of water, that all things in the world have consciousness. And he understands that when the tree allowed his awareness to penetrate into it, the tree still maintained its own identity. He wants to thank the tree for giving him shelter, thank the tree for allowing his human consciousness to enter into the tree's consciousness, and also thank the tree for letting him in during this process, while the tree also maintained its identity as a tree, and you also maintained your identity as a human. Maintaining each one's own identity is not in conflict.

According to your terms, it was when man lost this identification that the use of language began. When we can no longer merge with the tree, we need language. If we could merge with the tree, if we could merge with all things in the world, what would we need language for? You have directly merged your consciousness with the other's consciousness, so what need is there for language to communicate?

I must emphasize again that the identification was not symbolic.

He is afraid you will understand it as a description or an exaggerated description -- no, it is not symbolic, it is actual, it is fact. People at that time actually behaved this way in daily life.

Modern people, if you activate the inner senses, you also have this ability. It is very easy -- you merge with the object you are observing. If you do not understand this, you can look at Stella's sharing about these nine inner senses; she gives a simple description of her own personal experiences in relation to the nine inner senses.

Nature, then, spoke for man, and man spoke for nature.

They spoke for each other, represented each other.

In the emotional amplification of which you were unaware, each person's private emotions were given expression and release through the changes of nature, were understood, and were regarded as a natural release.

Each person's personal emotions, in the process of identifying and merging with all things, were given a broader -- he calls it "amplification" -- your emotions were amplified through nature. This process is unknown to you; your emotions were amplified, and given expression and release, and regarded as a natural release.

Do we have this emotion? Yes, we do. The ancients said "the virtuous delight in mountains, the wise delight in waters," and so on. Our simplest feeling: when we travel to a place of extremely beautiful scenery, our hearts suddenly open up, our thoughts and our state of being are suddenly elevated. Do you find that your emotions are amplified in this process? This is also the main reason we are willing to travel, why we spend money and time on travel. In this process our emotions are intensified. Seth points this out -- because at this time you have already merged with nature. When you merge with nature, nature is like an amplifier, and it amplifies your personal emotions when you merge your consciousness with it, when you put your own consciousness into nature. So every person in such natural settings, especially when climbing to a peak, when all mountains seem small beneath you, or when seeing an endless grassland or a vast ocean -- that feeling is greatly elevated. Everyone has this experience, and this experience is what Seth is describing now.

In the deepest terms, weather conditions and emotions are still extremely related.

Fundamentally speaking, weather and your emotions are related. Your inner condition causes changes in the outer climate. When you merge with nature, your inner emotions are amplified. If you are a positive, optimistic person full of light within, then everything resonates, and nature also shows its brilliant side. If at this time you are depressed, in a very bad mood, then what you see is also drizzling rain and gloom, also endless sorrow. You and the climate are connected; your emotions are amplified through nature -- if you are good, it amplifies the good for you; if you are not good, it amplifies the bad. So your inner condition causes changes in the outer climate. How frightening. So when the weather is bad, do not blame others -- it has something to do with you.

Although your current view seems to be exactly the opposite -- we now think that because it rains, my mood is bad; because the weather is bad, my mood is bad. Seth says it is exactly the opposite: because your mood is bad, the weather is bad.

Since you no longer identify with the forces of nature, you are deprived -- or you deprive yourselves -- of one of your most basic means of expression.

What means of expression? Expressing your emotions through nature, through merging with nature, with trees, with water, with mountains, with rivers, merging with them to express your emotions and amplify them. You do not identify with nature -- it is not that nature does not let you identify with it, it is that you yourself do not identify with it, so he says "you deprive yourselves."

But man wanted to pursue a certain kind of consciousness, in your terms, over a period of time, he pulled his expression back, he no longer identified as much as before, and began to see objects through his own body -- this object.

From early humans to later periods, there developed a self-consciousness; he pursued a certain kind of consciousness -- that is, our human ego consciousness. This ego consciousness, in human terms, required a period of time. How did he pull it back? He used his body, this object, to see objects; he no longer used his consciousness to see other objects as before. He used his body, his eyes, nose, ears, his outer senses to see the world. He no longer merged his perception into the world he observed.

Therefore he learned to see a tree as a thing.

At this point, when he looked at the tree, it was just the shape of a tree, just a thing that could be cut for firewood, could be used to build houses. A tree was a tree. But before, he would join himself into the tree. When he joined into the tree, he could see from the tree's perspective, and look back at himself. Now humans no longer have this ability; they can only see the tree from its external image, and cannot see the inner nature of the tree.

Words and Images: After Losing Inner Perception

It was from that time on, when people could no longer join with the tree from within, but instead looked at the tree from its outer image, that mental images became as important as they are now. The images in our minds became so important because we no longer had the ability to communicate with all things -- not that you merged into them, but that you lost the ability to communicate with them through consciousness.

He had understood these images before, but in a different way, from the inside out. Now he used a different way, from the outside in; he could only look at the tree from the outside.

Now he began to draw and sketch from life -- he means that humanity began to draw and sketch from life, learning how to build images in the mind, to build images in the head. Through pictorial images, including the earliest pictographs, all of this came about in this way.

At that time (in the way now accepted), he related to real, external things.

He no longer had this ability; he could only relate to external things in an external way. He had lost the inner connection.

Now he walked not only for pleasure, but to obtain the information he wanted.

He did not need to before. Before, he only had to merge with the river to see far away, and merge with the wind to see what the wind saw. Now he could not do that anymore; he had to rely on his feet to walk, and he could only use his physical eyes to see. He had to travel long distances, and this was a path his consciousness had once been able to travel freely. Before, when he rode the wind, his consciousness was not limited by such distances and could travel over them at will. But now he no longer had this ability. After he separated from nature, he had no choice but to use his own eyes to feel things personally, to use his body to feel them. Seth is actually using this to satirize how humanity is regressing.

Therefore he needed primitive maps and signs.

He had to walk, and since his consciousness could no longer be sent out whenever he wanted as before, he needed maps. He had to keep records, or he would get lost. He no longer used the whole image; he could only work on the micro level, using partial images instead. He could not pass through the whole valley like the wind and have an intuitive knowledge of it; he could only explore the valley bit by bit, locally.

Such as circles, or fragments of straight lines, to stand for natural objects.

Here is a rock, so draw a small square; there is water, so draw a symbol. So our most primitive human language, the pictographic writing, all came from this. Because he no longer had this ability, he could only rely on records. If he did not record, he would forget, he would not find the way, and he could not communicate with others. So at this time writing came into being.

Once he used sound to communicate emotion, intent, and pure exuberance.

He began to use sound to express -- emotion, intent, what he wanted to do, and exuberance. If you see people in primitive tribes, many times when they are excited they make those very exuberant howling sounds; it is all like this.

As he became involved with written or drawn images, he began to imitate their shapes with the shape of his lips.

He began to use the shape of his lips to simulate, to imitate their shapes. For example, O is perfect, representing one of the sounds deliberately made at the beginning of spoken language. So in English people often say OK. What does O represent? O is actually quite similar to the "O" in our six-syllable mantra (the "Om" in Om Mani Padme Hum); it is one of the primal sounds of the universe. O is actually a description of the natural objects he observed. He thought that perfect things were all round -- whether the sun, the moon, or water, he thought perfect things were all round. So at this time language began to be born.

The Structure of Sound: Inner Amplification

No matter which language you speak — he says this and I am just giving a Western language as an example — the sounds you can produce depend on the structure of your mortal body. The sounds you can produce are all limited, because your physical structure determines that you cannot produce an unlimited range of sounds. Your vocal cords, your breathing, your oral cavity, and so on — your body structure determines that your pronunciation is limited. Therefore, human language is composed of a certain limited set of sounds.

The construction of your bodies is the result of the arrangement of inner portions, and the sounds you make are connected with that.

Our physical bodies are all generated by our inner world. In The Nature of Personal Reality, I remember there is a chapter — the one about the body of flesh and blood — where he mentioned this and explained it in great detail: our human physical body is formed by inaudible sounds, invisible light, and electromagnetic waves that cannot be measured, which make up an invisible body, and our physical body emerges from that invisible body. So our body structure determines our pronunciation, and our body structure is in turn determined by inner things, so our pronunciation is also determined by our inner structure — the so-called inner structure being the part of our inner self, or the deeper part of you.

Earlier I said that early humans felt a certain amplification of emotion. For example, he felt that the sound of the wind was like his own. In ancient times, when a person felt a sense of power, he could feel the wind, including storms and such. The ordinary sound of wind, the sound of wind passing across the earth, he felt was his own voice, and that voice was certainly louder than his own, so he felt that he was one with nature, that the sounds nature made were his sounds, and so his emotions at that time were very large, amplified.

In a certain fashion, your language, as it expresses your individual intent and communications, also represents an amplification arising from the arrangement of your molecules.

When your language serves to express your individual intent in communication, it represents an amplification of your molecular arrangement, of your inner part. How should we understand this sentence? It means that the language you speak is an amplification of a part of your inner self. Just as the sound of wind in nature is an amplification of a sound that humans considered to be their own. And your voice is produced by your physical body, and your physical body is generated by your inner psyche, so the sound you produce — no matter that every person's voice is different, each voice has its own characteristics — is actually an amplification of your inner self.

Wind forms certain sounds according to the nature of the land, and breath forms certain sounds according to the characteristics of the body.

The process of sound passing through your vocal cords and being produced is certainly determined by your vocal cords or your body structure, just as wind passing across the earth produces different sounds of wind because of the different shapes of the land.

There are correlations between letters and the molecular structure that composes your tissues.

Letters form our writing and our language, while our molecular structure forms our bodily organs, and our bodily organs determine the final pronunciation, just as letters determine the written form of a language. There is a certain correlation between them.

Letters are therefore also sounds of nature, and these sounds of nature, these corresponding relationships, have a molecular history that forms your sounds into certain specific patterns of sound.

It is like saying that a particular kind of inner molecule forms the differences in your particular body structure, and only the differences in your physical structure allow you to produce the differences in your voice. What kind of molecular structure forms what kind of sound — this mapping relationship in between can be called a kind of code, a kind of secret key. The correspondence of these keys is a specific pattern of sound, and this specific pattern of sound provides you with a certain kind of communication, which is what allows you to communicate. In other words, when you want to communicate with others, it is done through producing sound. What he means is that before this sound is produced, the two of you first have an inner communication, and you want to express that inner communication through sound, so this is necessarily a process from the inside out.

But it also allows a natural molecular expression at that level, which is then used by you for your own purposes.

Your voice is at first an expression of your biological molecules, that is, an expression of your body structure. But the sound it produces can also be used by you — you can make it represent different emotions and different meanings. At first there is no necessary connection between sound and meaning, but you add a connection to it, and it becomes something used by you.

I am not saying that molecules can speak, but I am saying that they express themselves through your language.

Although molecules cannot speak, your speaking cannot be separated from molecules — that is, from the molecular structure at the very bottom layer of our material world. Molecules form cells, cells form organs, organs form the vocal tract, and also the capacity of the lungs, the thickness and width of the trachea, the shape of the oral cavity, the position of the teeth, and so on, all determine the expression of all your sounds. So your voice can be called an outer expression of molecules. Although molecules cannot speak, it is indeed an outer expression of molecules.

And your language represents an amplification of their existence.

Your language represents an amplification of the inner molecules. Through your written words, their reality is also amplified. Just as human emotions are amplified through material elements. In ancient times, humans merged their emotions and their consciousness with certain elements of nature, and when they merged together, the sounds they produced were the sounds humans wanted to produce — an amplification, an amplifier, of human emotion. Like the sound of wind being like a certain person's voice — I think everyone has often seen this in literary works. Many writers say, "The wind is sobbing, it is weeping," "The wind is like this or that, like those wronged spirits," and so on. It is actually a form of anthropomorphic expression, but you think it is anthropomorphism when in fact it is a real expression — humans place their emotions into nature to amplify them, turning them into an amplifier.

So then, our written words are also an amplification of our inner molecules and cells.

Certain sounds are replicas of the speech of molecular construction.

Sound is a replica of our molecular construction. When sounds are put together by you to form a sentence, it is just like molecules being put together to form cells or tissues.

There is a kind of inner sound, like the interlayers between tissues, covered over by molecules, and these serve as a basis for the principle of outer sound.

Inner sound is the basis of the principle of outer sound, and this is also related to the rhythms of the body itself. How does your outer sound actually come out? It comes from an inner sound, and the inner sound is something very fundamental.

To some extent, punctuation is a pause in sounds you do not hear, implying the presence of a sound not uttered.

Is punctuation a pause? It pauses there, and that implies a place where a sound should have been made but was not made, a place that stopped, indicating the presence of that unuttered sound.

And to some extent, your language depends upon the unspoken as much as upon the spoken, and upon the silent rhythms as much as upon the sounds.

The parts of our language that do not make sound are just as important as the parts that do make sound. If our language had no intervals, and you kept talking continuously, others would not know what you were saying. If you used audio software to process it and removed all the pauses in the middle of the sound, it would have no meaning at all — the sound would become something like noise. The reason language is language is precisely because it has pauses in the middle, things that are not said. So the parts of language that do not make sound and the parts that do make sound are equally important. Without these non-sounding parts, the sounding parts would have no meaning. Those silent rhythms are just as important as the sounds.

At that level, however, silence only involves the pauses in sound, within which sound is implied — sound that is implied but not actually released.

Inner sound mainly deals with that kind of relationship — not how your sound is produced, because that is determined by your physical body. But you have a kind of inner sound, and that inner sound is a foundation, a principle, for your language. Your inner sound specifically handles the pauses in the middle of language — how long to pause, how to pause, when to pause. These things are the core that determines the entire expression of your language.

Language is meaningful only because of the silent rhythm upon which it rides.

The meaning of language comes from the pauses between sounds just as much as from the sounds themselves.

The breath's tributaries are obviously important, making regular variations in rhythm and in the spacing of words and phrases. The integrity of the breath springs directly from the proper give-and-take between cells, and the functioning of the tissues.

The integrity of your breathing certainly comes from the proper give-and-take between cells, and also depends on the functioning of your tissues and organs — and all of those are an expression of the ability of molecules. The give-and-take of cells and the functioning of organs and tissues are all determined at the molecular level. Language obviously should be attributed to that ability, because without it there would be no breath, and without breath you certainly could not speak. But beyond that, that ability is also connected with the patterns of language itself, the results of syntax, and even the construction of words — this is the most basic level.

Again, you speak for yourself, but in so doing the language you speak is not yours alone, but the result of inner communications so swift that you cannot follow them.

When you are speaking, you have no idea how you organize your language. When you speak a foreign language and are not yet fluent, you think about how to organize the language — subject, verb, object, subordinate clauses, tenses, grammar, you have to organize all of it. But when you speak your mother tongue, you do not have to think about these questions at all — the words just come out. And this ability to speak your mother tongue effortlessly conceals behind it a great deal of inner communication that you cannot follow and do not even know is happening — you are closely connected with your consciousness, your thoughts, your molecules, the amount and force of the airflow you produce, the strength of your vocal cords, the adjustment of the vocal cord muscles, the position of your tongue, the size of your oral cavity, and so on. The complexity in the middle of this far exceeds your imagination, yet it seems you do not have to manage any of it — it all happens automatically.

This ability of language is the result of swiftness beyond your following. It also involves physical and subjective reality.

It is connected with your physical structure, your nervous system, and all aspects of that, and also with your thoughts and subjective reality — language certainly comes from this.

For that reason, your language is meaningful on several levels.

It is not only meaningful on the level of what you say, the level that others hear. From the very beginning when it is initiated, from the molecular level — from molecules to tissues, to your muscle tissue, cellular tissue, to your organs, to your airflow, and so on — it is meaningful on all levels, not just the meaning you finally speak.

The sounds you make have a physical effect upon your own bodies and those of others. There is a value of meaning, apart from the value of the sounds themselves.

When you speak with others, or communicate with others, you have a physical effect on both your own body and the bodies of others. So never underestimate the power of language. That is why when we do meditation, or when we do many of the exercises, I ask everyone to speak it aloud, to recite it — these things are meaningful. It is not like we are just shouting slogans, no. Language has a physical effect on your body and the bodies of others on all levels — it has already been said here, it is a physical effect, not an effect of meaning, not an effect on thought, but a physical effect on the body.

The words you speak to another are, in certain terms, broken down by the listener into basic components, and on other levels they are understood and formed into a psychological interpretation.

From the perspective of the listener, he breaks them down into basic components; and on other levels — on the physical level, the tissue level, the cellular level, the molecular level — they are formed into a psychological interpretation. Sound and its pauses express emotional states, and these reactions will alter the condition of the body — to what extent? What he means is that the extent of the alteration exceeds your imagination, "to whatever extent."

The listener analyzes and understands the language, and builds up his own response.

You so connect words and images that language seems to contain a sound that implies a certain image.

Humans associate sound and language with images so closely. When I say "blue sky and white clouds," you immediately think of such an image. When I say "gentle spring breeze," the moment you think of the words "spring breeze," you can feel as if the spring breeze is brushing against your face. It is a kind of image.

There are languages, however, that have sounds that express feelings and subjective states, and some that have sounds that express images of objective things, and they have no subjects and predicates, not even sentence structures that you would recognize.

Some languages are sounds that express your feelings, your personal feelings and subjective states, your own cognition, your own thoughts. These things have already transcended language itself, transcended the cognition of your normal language, and they do not even have normal grammatical structures, so they are hard for us to understand. When a person wants to describe his own subjective feelings to you, he often does not know how to say it. For example, when we look at very beautiful scenery, apart from saying "Oh, how beautiful, how pretty," you seem unable to find more words to describe that subjective feeling. Like the feeling of two people in love — if you ask him to describe it, he cannot describe it either. Try writing about your feeling of being in love — can you describe it? You cannot describe it either. This kind of thing is very difficult, because as he said, it does not even have subjects, predicates, or many grammatical structures — what you write may not even form proper sentences.

I remember there was a writer — I forget which writer — who was very interesting. In his novel, when describing a woman's thighs, he used a very interesting phrase — "resounding thighs." This is very hard to understand as his subjective feeling. Although he was describing an objective thing, he put very strong emotion into it. And that is still just the description of an objective thing. Describing subjective things is even harder — for example, describing a state of entering meditation, or a perception of a certain thing, is very hard to describe in language.

Your language must follow your perceptions.

Language must follow your perception — whatever you can feel, you can say.

I am today, I was yesterday, I will be tomorrow.

(What he said is the English "I am today, I was yesterday, I will be tomorrow.") These are all language, and they are easy to understand, because they contain self-perception within them. However, some languages would consider this kind of statement impossible to understand.

What kind of language? For example, when it says "I am," this word would be used within all particles. When I only say these two words, "I am," you cannot understand what he wants to say — there is nothing after it, just two words. Do you know what he wants to say? You do not. That is what he means.

At this point, Seth said you may take a break, or end the session, whichever you prefer. Then at 11:55 — actually it was almost 12 — during the break, Jane found that she felt very fatigued, and decided not to continue the session, and the session ended there. Why? Because this session was actually quite strenuous, because the depiction and description of this subject matter is not so easy to understand. Although Seth had done his utmost to describe the process of the earliest birth of humanity and the birth of language.

I hope that everyone can also gain a preliminary understanding. If you are a linguist researching this area, that would be wonderful — you could discover many insights from it that you had never thought of before.

This concludes the second part of the interpretation of Chapter Six. I wish everyone a magical day.

The Earliest Mode of Knowing

Today we continue with the third part of our reading of Chapter 6 of the Seth book The Nature of the Psyche. This part is from Session 777 of the book, which began on Monday, May 24, 1976, at 9:45 in the evening. At the start of the session, they said good evening to Seth.

Seth said that in the very beginning, before the images and words you understand were born, the world existed in a way different from what you now perceive. The way the world existed at that time is something your present perception cannot grasp. In other words, the world that ancient humans saw back then was not the same as what we see today.

In the very beginning, before the images and words you understand were born, the world existed in a way different from what you now perceive.

The images you think of had not yet taken on the forms you recognize. For example, what a mountain looks like, what a tree looks like, what a flower looks like, what an animal looks like, what water looks like — at that time, none of these things were the way we now think of them. The world that humans saw back then was completely different from what we see now.

Different in what way? What they saw was a more essential part of the world, rather than the outer appearances we see today.

Let me give a simple example: humans at that time could see the meridian pathways running through every person's body, so they could tell where your meridians had problems, where they were blocked, where the blood flow was not moving. People in ancient times could use acupuncture — though at that time there may have been no needles — pressing or clearing the blocked spot with a sharp stone, using that kind of stone method to treat it. The image of a person we see now is not the same as the image of a person seen in ancient times. People back then could see that the internal organs inside a person were transparent, and they could also see the movement of the meridians in our bodies. That is how it was.

A tree was also not what we see now. What they saw was the inner essence of the tree itself, the kind of thing expressed by the tree's consciousness.

Session 777

For example, to you it seems that nature must be put together visually in a certain specific way, or be perceived in that way.

We think nature definitely presents itself to us as a kind of scene: mountains look like mountains, water looks like water, and this is what we think nature is. When we look at the world today, it is like this. We think that hundreds of thousands of years ago, or even millions of years ago, human beings saw the world the same way. Seth tells you: no, back then it was not like that at all.

No matter what your language is, the trees, mountains, people, seas, oceans that you perceive are all the same.

This has nothing to do with language. Today, people from different periods should see the same thing originally -- what we see today is simply the visualized form of these things as they are today. But that does not mean that what earlier humans saw was also like this. This is the question he wants to discuss.

He gives an example:

You have never seen a person and a tree merged into one.

Your eyes can see a person, and you can also see a tree, but your eyes have never seen what it looks like when a person and a tree are fused together.

This would be regarded as an image of an illusion.

If this kind of image appears in your dream, or when you are meditating, you would consider it an illusion.

Your visual information is learned, and it is interpreted.

Our cognition of images -- our vision, the way we see things -- an apple is red, a flower is bright, grass is green, where does this visual information come from? It is acquired after birth, and then it is interpreted. In primitive times, what we saw was not like this; later, as generation after generation developed, in the end the picture you see has already become like this. But this kind of thing is also handed to you by your parents. Within this there is both a part of your human inheritance and a part handed to you by your parents -- from childhood they told you this is an apple, this is a banana, you have a correct cognition of things, and then you say this is red, this is yellow. But this is secondary.

Before that, what your eyes saw was already different from what the earliest primitive humans saw at the very beginning. The reason is that your inner senses are no longer applied as much.

To give a simpler example: we often say that children can see many unclean things, and it is the same principle. Is the world in a child's eyes the same as the world in our adult eyes? No, not exactly the same. This acquired vision of ours is all learned later. This visual information seems as if it were the only possible result of that information -- what we see is the only accurate thing.

And your inner vision can then frighten you.

After you open the inner senses, what you see with your heart, or what you see with your consciousness, may not be the same as this, and instead it can frighten you. For example, when a person and a tree are mixed together, when you see it you will inevitably feel very frightened, feeling that this cannot be real, that this must be an illusion.

Because in your mind, you often see very clearly those things -- if your eyes were open, you would reject this image.

You can only see what your heart believes in and accepts. You believe a person is a person and a tree is a tree, so when you open your eyes, suppose you saw a person and a tree fused together, becoming a tree-person, you would think this is not real, this is illusion and fantasy. "Reject" means to firmly push it away. Your eyes can only see what you believe, and you cannot see what you do not believe, because you reject it.

The Example of Columbus's Fleet

I previously told a story here about Columbus exploring the American continent. At that time, some indigenous people in the Caribbean were on their islands, and when Columbus's fleet was already very close to the shore, they could already see the changes in the waves and swells in the sea, but their eyes still could not see these ships.⁶

Why could they not see them? The reason is simple: in their cognitive system, the thing called a "ship" simply did not exist for them in the first place. At that time, at most they might have had a small dugout canoe, and that was already pretty good -- I am not even sure whether they had dugout canoes; assuming they did, they were only small dugout canoes. But those large sailing ships, several stories tall, were impossible for them to appear: something they had never seen in their entire lives, something they had never seen in several lifetimes, something even their ancestors had never seen. So they simply rejected it and did not believe that anything could come from the sea. Nothing could possibly be on the sea, and they also had no concept of a ship; they did not know what such a thing was. So when Columbus's entire fleet appeared before them, they looked but did not see it; they simply could not see it.

The local shaman was told that the seawater had changed, but no one knew why it had changed. This shaman stood by the shore, held his breath and calmed his mind, and after concentrating for a long time, suddenly before his eyes there appeared one of these -- like a mirage-like image -- a fleet appearing on the ocean, on the great sea, heading toward them. Only then did he tell his people: Look, what is that thing? Under his pointing and description, these people were then able to see the ships.

Because this history is too far in the past, and it was only after Columbus came ashore and communicated with and described things to the local people that such a historical record was made in Columbus's records, we today can only know a little about it. But we have no way of finding the people involved at the time to have them describe in detail the process of going from not seeing to seeing. I place this matter here as an illustration -- we need not investigate how much truth there actually is in this example itself; this example illustrates extremely well the issue Seth wanted to discuss: we humans will not believe those things that we do not believe in, or that we consider illogical or unreasonable, and we will reject them all.

Early Humans Used the Inner Senses

But according to the way Seth is speaking now, he says:

Young humans, that is, early humans, used what I call the inner senses far more than you do.

Early humans used the inner senses far more skillfully than we modern humans do, so visually, early humans saw the physical world differently from the world that seems so natural to you. Remember this firmly: it was different. When you yourself eventually open the inner senses, you will be able to feel what the world looks like through your own eyes.

He says, "You must give me some time." He is in one of many advantageous pauses, because he is thinking about how to explain it.

For example, when one person's consciousness blended with the consciousness of a tree, that information became visual and was perceived by others. When one person's consciousness blended with the consciousness of an animal, that blending became visual information.

What he means is, when one person's consciousness blends with the consciousness of a tree -- this person places their own consciousness into the tree -- at that point, they perceive the world through the tree's way of perceiving. The tree itself has no eyes, so the way it perceives the world uses its own perceptual system, its inner sensory system, which is quite different from the human way of perceiving. To blend your own consciousness with the consciousness of a tree, first you have to be able to do this, which means your inner senses must already be open; if your inner senses cannot open, this cannot be done.

After your inner senses open, you look at the whole world from the tree's perspective, and you have two perspectives: one is your own perspective, and one is the tree's perspective. You have two blended perspectives for looking at the world. But both of these perspectives must become visual results before they can be transmitted into your consciousness and recognized by you. Because the way humans recognize things, from early conscious cognition to finally becoming visual cognition, is a process. So at that point, for this blended perception to be perceived and recognized by humans, it must still be transformed into a visual sensation before humans can perceive it. If it cannot become visual information, or cannot become imagistic information, humans cannot understand it.

In other words, even if you place your consciousness together with the tree, and on the level of consciousness you can understand all of the tree's perceptions, if you want to become a human perceiving the tree's perceptions, you still have to transform it into a visualized image. If you do not do this, there is no way for you to perceive it, and no way for others to perceive it either.

Let me give an example: suppose you become merged with the tree's consciousness, just like when Stella came to share her feelings -- doesn't she have to describe that process to you? When she describes that process, she definitely has to use an imagistic, visual way, or some kind of image -- she says the tree's leaves became thicker, and then how the tree's perception was, and then it seemed that from the tree's perspective, the perception of the whole world was like this. So for others to know it, it must be a visual method.

When one person's consciousness blends with an animal's consciousness, it is the same: the blending also becomes visual information. The animal also uses your eyes to look at the world, and you also use the animal's eyes to look at the world. But here it is not limited to the eyes -- remember firmly, it is more that the inner senses are being used at the same time. You use the animal's conscious intuition to look at the world, and the animal also uses your human intuitive perspective to look at the world. But no matter how these two intuitions look, if it is to be understood and perceived by humans, it must be transformed into a visual method. This is a very interesting matter.

Fixity and Non-Fixity of Visual Content

Let us continue:

In a manner of speaking, the brain puts visual information together, so the visual content of the world is not as fixed as the Tomus particles.

The way to understand this passage is: our human brain takes all this data, all this visual information, and puts it together, possibly mixing it together for processing. Once it is mixed together, what happens? The world, in terms of this visual content, is no longer so fixed. You do not need to worry about the "Tomus particles" analogy -- whether the analogy is good or not, you do not need to worry about it. He is simply saying that this visual content is no longer as fixed as you imagine.

Why is that? Because when a human looks at the world, that is one kind of visual cognition of the world, while other species look at it with different cognitions: a flower sees this world from a flower's perspective, a tree sees this world from a tree's perspective. All things in the world must use their own consciousness to perceive this world. We say that all things have consciousness, all things have spirit, and all these things have their own ways of perceiving the world. When their ways of perceiving the world are superimposed upon our visual information, our perception of the world is no longer so fixed -- it is not a single perspective, but multiple perspectives.

You learned to be highly specific in your physical sight and in the whole world.

We humans learned to be highly specific in physical sight -- that is, the sight of optical imaging, the kind of thing a camera captures of the external world -- and in the whole world. How do we interpret what is captured, how do we distinguish that this is the sky, this is the earth, this is the mountains, this is the rivers, this is the trees, this is the flowers and grass? These interpretations, we humans want to make specific, and highly specific at that. Because originally the visual aspect of the world is not fixed, yet we humans desperately want to make it specific, want to fix it in place.

Your psychic reality retains the hints of material that could be, but was not, perceived in visual physical terms.

Our psychic reality -- that is, the image of things as we see them inwardly, the image of the world seen through the inner senses -- retains the hints of the material of visual physical perception. When we look at this world from an optical angle, from a camera's angle, it is a photograph, an image. Behind this image -- behind this sense data -- there are hints. Our psychic reality, that is, the image in our mind's eye, contains these hints, preserves these hints. But we have not perceived these hints.

This sentence goes around and around -- what is he trying to say? Each of you sees a scene, a sight, a thing, and this thing forms an image in your mind. The image in your mind contains, beyond the appearance itself, many hints of the material object, hints that we have not perceived, but they are already contained within it, already contained within this image information, only we humans are unable to perceive them.

Then:

You trained yourselves to respond to certain visual cues that set your psychic interpretation into motion.

We humans trained ourselves, with regard to this entire psychic picture -- this picture in our minds -- to interpret it psychically, to respond to certain hints within it, while ignoring other variations, turning a blind eye to other hints, not perceiving them.

Do we now understand what he is trying to say? Every thing we see, the image that forms in our minds, contains complete information. But we humans can only interpret a portion of the hints, while turning a blind eye to another portion of the hints. Why do we turn a blind eye? Because these latter ones, we could describe them as being too subtle -- too subtle, too fine, too small, so we do not notice them.

In fact they are not subtle, and not small. For they are no more subtle than the hints you acknowledge and accept; they are the same.

It is only that your choice is different; you chose to ignore them. For example, when we look at a leaf, we can only see the leaf's color, its patterns, or something like that. But can you see the veins inside this leaf? Can you see the core of its photosynthesis? You cannot see it. But are those things in there? Of course they are in there. Yet we cannot sense them; we feel that those are too minute, too fine, too microscopic. Seth says: it is not because they are too microscopic; it is because your focus is not on them, so you feel that those are trivial details, very subtle -- "subtle" meaning especially small and also hard to understand. In fact it is not like that; it is because you humans chose not to accept these hints. You only see the leaf's outline, shape, color, size, and so on, while you cannot see the things of the leaf itself. Change it to an animal, a tree, a stone, and it is all the same: we only see its surface things -- the things we call big, the things we call core elements -- when in fact we have ignored the true core elements.

Direct Cognition and the Inner Senses

Seth paused for a long time again. You can see here that Seth had an extremely difficult time transmitting this material.

He said that this information is stored in the chromosomes. We humans often say that human genetic information is stored in the chromosomes, and in some way it is strung together, just like the arrangements and combinations in DNA. We often talk about DNA sequencing -- since we say sequencing, and since there is a sequence, it must be strung together, right? It is the arrangement and combination of DNA base pairs. Using four base pairs in arrangements and combinations produces the genetic code, and this is information.

Then let us say for now that in biology, these are direct cognitions. We call this kind of genetic information or gene encoding on DNA a kind of direct cognition. Human society today can already use technological means to fully sequence it, to sequence the gene sequence and this genetic code. This is a kind of direct cognition.

If these are direct cognitions -- if we think that genetic information exists purely within the chromosomal DNA, transmitted in this sequenced way, and this is a kind of direct cognition -- then he said, your inner senses perceive directly in the same way.

If we say for now that in biology, those are direct cognitions, then the inner senses perceive directly in the same way.

Here "qieshuo" means for the sake of argument -- for the sake of argument, let me use biology as an example for you. Your inner senses directly perceive the information behind these DNA sequences. Whether it is translated as "data" or not -- here translating it as "information" is better, and the original really is "data" -- you cannot completely ignore the genetic information contained in the DNA information. The human inner senses can read it directly. We can perceive it directly and read it directly, without needing various instruments, without needing any equipment. Moreover, current equipment and instruments still cannot fully read it. What they read is only the biological data sequence, and then it still has to be compared with actual reality.

But in fact we humans have this ability, and we can perceive it directly through the inner senses. What are the inner senses? This is what the inner senses are: they skip over all external forms, skip over all the DNA, all the encoding, all the cells, and read directly -- with one look they know what this person's genetic information includes, and there is much, much more beyond what human cognition recognizes.

Just as he said, the entire history of our human race is written within the cells. Where is it written? In what position within the cells? Is it written in the genetic material of the cells? Is it written within the DNA? I remember someone once asked Seth this question, and Seth said no. The storage of that information is not in a material way as you humans imagine. Do not always use a material perspective to understand or imagine this thing.

Just as Seth said, every cell contains all the historical information of the entire human race from the beginning until now. So where does this information exist? If I go and read it, is it in the chromosomes? Is it in the DNA sequence, in the encoding? No. Is it the result of an encoding? It is not like that. It exists in a place within our cells that transcends our three-dimensional space, our material space. It is a multidimensional existence, existing in that kind of way, not in a place that can be found with our three-dimensional microscopes and three-dimensional things.

Seth also said that if the information stored in a single cell were displayed in a way that you humans could understand, how much information would there be? He said that if it were converted into books, displayed in the form of words, that information would be about the size of the Earth. If you fully unfolded and fully decoded the information in one cell, and presented the contents to you in a way that you humans could understand -- Seth did not use a quantity of data at the time, because people did not have the concept of computers, no concepts of bits, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes -- he could not describe it, and could only say that if this information were written in books, turned into books, it would take up about the size of the entire Earth. He gave a vivid example.

So you should know that this information is not on the level that you humans can recognize. Do not try to find these things on the material level; you will not find them. Today we humans have only just begun to recognize a tiny bit at the genetic level, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. Before genes were discovered, we humans had no idea where genetic information existed; only in recent decades have we just begun to know a tiny bit, and even that still exists in a material way.

Language as Symbol

He says:

For you, language also means words, and words are always a symbol of emotion, or feeling, or intent, or desire.

For us humans, language and words refer to words. Words are always a symbol of emotion, intent, and desire.

Direct cognition does not need symbols.

Direct cognition does not need these symbols, which means it does not need these words, nor does it need language. The first language -- the original language -- did not involve images or words, but dealt with direct cognition. The natural flow of data directly processes direct information, bypassing these intermediate links, these symbols -- the symbols of language and words.

Here he gives an example: when you open the inner senses, the information you receive is all direct information, not through these words or images -- including images, that is, the images as you know them: a tree, a flower, the world before your eyes, this dazzling world, all the things in the world within our sight, they are all a kind of symbol. Seth sometimes uses "camouflage," sometimes says "symbol" -- it is a kind of symbol, just like words. If you can recognize that words are symbols of emotion, then you can understand that the images you see are also symbols of that species, that object, that life, and not the thing itself. If you open the inner senses, you communicate directly with that essence, you exchange with the core beneath its image, and what you see is that, not this outer image.

So after the Buddha attained enlightenment, he urged and exhorted everyone countless times: the world we see, this so-called dazzling and bewildering world of flowers, he said it is all like a dream, like an illusion⁷ -- like a dream, like an illusion, like poetry, like prose, like words, with no substantial meaning. It is only a representation and a symbol, it is not real. Look how anxious the Buddha was, he wanted so much to make it clear to you, but he just could not explain it. It is not that this thing is unreal, no -- it is that what it presents to you is only a symbol and an appearance.

The Blending and Merging of Consciousness

Now we say a person wonders: What is a tree like? What does it feel like to be a tree? What is it like to be a tree? And then what does he do? He becomes a tree. Is this curiosity not his desire? Is his wanting to know what a tree is like not his desire, his intent, the thing he wants to feel? Right, so because he has such a desire, such an intent, he wants to feel that kind of feeling, he becomes a tree, and he feels. And he lets his own consciousness flow into that tree.

In the previous session he talked about how there are certain passageways among all things in the world, and these passageways allow consciousness to flow through them. He uses a materialized image that we humans can understand to tell you: it is as if there is a kind of countless, thread-like connection among all things, and within those threads there can flow streams of consciousness. This is only for the convenience of us humans understanding it from a material perspective. In fact, those threads are not needed at all, and there are no such threads. Those threads are only telling you about a possibility, that there is such a possibility, such a pathway.

So he says:

A person lets his own consciousness flow into the tree, and the person's consciousness, with the great curiosity of love, blends and merges with other kinds of consciousness.

At this time the person's consciousness, with the great curiosity of love, merges with the tree's consciousness, blends together with it.

A child does not merely look at an animal, but lets his consciousness merge with the consciousness of that animal.

A child looks at an animal, and he does not merely see a furry animal; he is letting his consciousness merge with that animal, and he becomes a part of that animal. The younger the child, the more he can do this.

Thus to some degree, the animal looks out through the child's eyes.

To a certain degree, the animal can perceive this world through the child's eyes.

Here let me give a simple example. This example is not quite apt, but I think it can illustrate some things. A couple of days ago I read about a case: a child kept a pet, and because the pet affected his studies, his mother, right in front of him, smashed the pet to death by throwing it to the ground alive—not just throwing it away, but actually smashing it to death alive. I imagine the mother was probably furious beyond control. But what no one expected was that as the mother smashed the pet to death in front of the child, blow after blow, the child said nothing, went to the kitchen, got a knife, and directly stabbed his mother to death.

There are many issues here, and we will not explore them for now. Let us explore only this one: can you understand it now? After a child has spent a long time with a pet, with an animal, his consciousness has actually merged with that animal's consciousness a great deal of the time. So when you smash that animal to death right in front of him, to him it is exactly the same as if you were smashing his consciousness to death alive right in front of him. And he no longer wants to live either, because he also feels that he has already died. I hope this is only one level of understanding.

Then he continues—Seth says this part is the most difficult to explain:

In the most difficult manner to explain, before a person kills an animal, he absorbs its spirit.

He absorbs the spirit of this animal, and therefore the spirit of that animal merges with himself, merges together with this person.

Thus when using the animal's flesh, when you eat the animal's flesh, the hunter believes he has given the animal a new focus of existence.

This hunter can draw out the animal's power, and the animal is also glad to participate in human consciousness.

Therefore nature and spirit are the same.

Nature and spirit are both the same.

For example, in ancient times when people hunted, people would think: after I hunt and eat this animal, then if I eat a deer, I will be as agile as a deer, I will obtain the deer's spirit and the deer's soul, and obtain the deer's power; if I hunt a bear and eat the bear, I will have the bear's power. In the past we always treated this as myth and as mythological stories. We often say "having eaten the gall of a bear and a leopard⁸," which is an old Chinese saying—what does it mean when you have eaten the gall of a bear and a leopard⁸? It means being recklessly bold, does it not? Why would eating the gall of a bear and a leopard⁸ make you recklessly bold? It proves that you have acquired the bear's power and the leopard's courage, is that not the meaning? So the Chinese have known this since ancient times. In ancient China there was always the practice of eating tiger bone, drinking tiger bone liquor, and also eating tiger meat, bear paws, and such things. What was that for? It was a kind of ancient, very primitive, cultural inheritance—he would think that he would thereby obtain some of the animal's abilities and power, and also some of the animal's spirit. Modern people think that in ancient times these things were real—and indeed they were so.

Rob's Different View

At this point, Rob had some different views. At 10:22, there was a two-minute pause -- you see, he paused for a full two minutes, saying nothing. Actually, Seth was thinking the whole time about how to put this in a way that would be easier for people to understand.

The last part of that information can give some clues about human behavior today: when people kill animals and eat them, it is for their consciousness, for reasons that have been forgotten. Why do humans eat animals now? Why do they take life? He says it is actually to let the animal perceive this world from a different perspective. So when people take life and eat animals, there is no need to feel guilty -- because first, they do it for survival, they have no choice but to eat; second, they can -- to use an ancient Chinese phrase -- deliver the animal. What "deliver" means here is that its soul is elevated, because when you eat the animal's flesh, you gain a part of the animal's power, and also a part of its spirit.

Rob said, if that is the case, then although today's humans have forgotten the original reason why they kill animals and eat them, people still kill animals -- today's taking of life is at least limited to an intuitive understanding. What he means is, so there is actually so much reasoning behind this: killing an animal is not causing its death, but letting its soul continue in another way. If you think about it from that angle, then humanity's taking of life today may be based on an intuition of this ancient knowledge, but people simply do not understand it.

Rob continued:

What is strange is that I wonder whether killing a human being has the same reason.

Since killing an animal is to deliver it, to let its soul continue, he says, does killing a human being have the same reason? Is that also why people kill? Actually, what Rob is saying here is more of a questioning and an understanding -- he is saying, if that is the case, then killing people also makes sense?

Because he did not say this question out loud, he thought it in his mind and wrote it down, so Seth did not give a reply to this question. Let us not expand on it here -- this question has already been addressed in the discussion of natural guilt. If you are not familiar with it, you can look at the section on natural guilt in The Nature of Personal Reality.

Focus of Consciousness and Background

Seth went on to say:

Your own focus, the focus of consciousness, rises from such a background. Therefore within yourselves you contain countless consciousnesses of which you are unaware.

He said the angle from which you now see things—your present focus of consciousness, the focus of consciousness with which you observe this world and perceive this world—all of it arises from such a vast background. You have eaten the myriad things of the world, and in fact the consciousness of those myriad things has already entered your body, only you do not know it. The people of ancient times knew this; people today no longer know it.

Whether you know it or not, you are within this background, and only then does the focus of your human consciousness take shape. What is called the focus of consciousness is simply your way of perceiving the world. So within your body, you think your focus belongs only to yourself, but in fact it already contains countless consciousnesses of which you are unaware: you have the consciousness of trees, the consciousness of this fruit, you have the consciousness of barley, the consciousness of wheat, the consciousness of rice, the consciousness of animals, the consciousness of meat, and so on.

Then through your own particular focus, the consciousness of nature blends together to form a composite, in which it takes delight in itself.

The consciousness of nature blends together and forms a composite. You yourself take delight in it, and nature also gains self-love within it—it loves itself. Because you have blended together with nature, you have eaten the grains of the world, eaten all kinds of animals, you are a part of nature, and you are naturally blended together with nature. So within your body there is all the consciousness of nature, and they are blended together.

So when Seth says you are a part of nature, or that nature is your extension, there is no contradiction in this—because even your consciousness is a composite that blends together all the consciousness of nature; one cannot say all of it, but it is a blend of many kinds of consciousness.

The Mixing of Consciousness and Self-Love

Part of what self-love means is that everything within it receives the call of love, and what is received is always based on love.

He says, for example:

For example, a symphony can emerge, right within it.

That is to say, a symphony can emerge within it. Because within self-love, a symphony can emerge within it. You do not understand, and you regard these as your own actions, and moreover as the actions of those other kinds of consciousness that you have deliberately forgotten.

When you yourselves act in your ordinary lives, doing this and doing that, all the actions of daily life, you do not realize that those are in fact also the actions of the consciousnesses of other species that you have forgotten but that you have eaten. Their consciousness is mixed into your consciousness, making you feel that it is you yourself who is acting, when in fact it is also they who are acting. That is to say, all of your actions represent the consciousness of nature acting.

When you follow your own purposes, acting according to your own ideas and your own purposes, you also achieve the purposes of those other consciousnesses that you have forgotten. You have long forgotten how many things you have eaten, yet their consciousness still functions within your consciousness. So when you achieve your purposes, you also, by the way, help them achieve their purposes. It is very interesting, and so your actions are the actions of nature.

So Seth repeatedly emphasizes that you, as a natural person, have no need whatsoever to ask yourself: Am I doing this right? Is it reasonable or not? Am I doing it well or badly? There is no need. You are nature, and you are merged into one with it.

In thinking your own private thoughts, you also add to a larger psychic and spiritual reality of which you are a part.

When you act and think for your own personal purposes, you are in fact also adding to a larger psychic and spiritual reality. What is meant by a larger psyche? It means that within your spirit, within your consciousness, there is not only yourself; you have more consciousness, and all of it is added to by you at the same time.

The Musician and the Notes Analogy

He said, your language plans your perceptions. It facilitates your communication, but in a certain way it also limits that communication. Then he turned to language: language can facilitate our communication, and at the same time it also limits our communication.

Why did he shift from that to this? Don't be impatient. His thinking goes beyond normal human understanding. Once he finishes speaking, you will understand.

When a musician writes a symphony, he does not use all the notes available.

When a musician creates a piece of music, he cannot possibly use all the notes. He makes choices and has preferences. Every musician has his own tastes; he likes different tones, tunes, chords, or melodies, and has his own preferences. But his choices are based on his perception of the information available. In other words, the reason he can select from all the notes the ones he likes to compose a piece is that he must have a complete cognition of that larger set of notes, or the fuller set of notes, in order to select from them what he wants and likes. If he did not know all these notes, if he only knew a limited few notes, then he could not possibly produce a very good piece of music. So he does not use all the notes, but he knows all the notes.

By the same principle, our human language is built upon an understanding of the inner mechanisms of communication among all species, and only then does our limited language emerge. Human language is formed on the basis of the inner knowledge of communicating with all things. When we communicate with all things, we do not need language or images; it is direct communication at the level of consciousness, a direct acquisition of knowledge. But for the convenience of communication, we humans produced language, and the emergence of language is based on this inner knowledge of communicating with all things, forming a language that is imagistic, regular, limited, and governed by specific rules. That is how language came to be.

The Stream of Consciousness Beneath Language

He says:

The secret of language cannot be found in the available sounds, accents, word roots, or syllables.

Why is that? Because it arises from this inner knowledge. So if you look for the secret of language in its outer manifestations -- in the sounds, accents, word roots, syllables -- you will not find it. It truly lies in the variations between words, the pauses and hesitations, and then the flow formed by putting those particles of tone together.

The real secret of language is a stream of consciousness. This includes, more than anything, the pauses, variations, hesitations, tone particles, and so on -- the combination of these forms a particular flow, and the core of this language is its underlying stream of consciousness. If you only focus on the language itself, only see these words, only hear the words I am speaking, then you only hear the consciousness of the words I speak, without grasping what is represented in my speech by the combination of sound and pauses and rhythm and tone and volume and so on -- that is, the stream of consciousness within my words. What you should grasp is my stream of consciousness, not the literal content of my words.

This ability is innate in people; it does not require training. Some people may be weaker at it; some people miss the point when they speak -- that is because they have not grasped the stream of consciousness beneath the language and the words, but instead have latched onto the surface of the language. He says:

And in the unspoken inferences that connect spoken and visual information.

Some things are not spoken aloud, but you can infer them through reasoning -- those images and visual data that he did not voice. So a person who truly listens can hear the overtones in the words -- that is, the part that was not said. If you cannot hear the part he did not say, and only see the surface of the words, then your understanding of language is still at the level of an elementary school student.

The same applies when you read the Seth material. If you only look at his words, sometimes you really do not know what he is talking about; but if you can grasp the stream of consciousness beneath Seth's words, then it becomes very easy to understand what the passage he is speaking is meant to convey. You follow his stream of consciousness, and only then can you understand his intent. If your stream of consciousness cannot keep up with his, and the connection breaks as you follow along, then you will not know what he is saying. When you are reading the Seth material and find yourself not understanding, stop and go back -- because at that point your stream of consciousness has already lost the thread. You are only seeing the words, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph of text, while the stream of consciousness beneath Seth's words has slipped away from you. This may be due to insufficient comprehension, or insufficient background knowledge, or insufficient focus, or your mind wandering -- all kinds of possibilities exist.

Personal Experience and Cooperation with the Natural World

He says:

As a species, as a race, you humans seek a certain kind of experience, individually and as a tribe or a nation, you follow certain processes.

You are seeking a certain kind of experience. From the perspective of each individual, or each organization, a nation, a tribe, a group, what you follow is a certain process, a process of historical development. For example, a political party, from a small party formed by one or two people at the very beginning, eventually becomes the ruling party of a country; a nation built from nothing to existence, this is all a process.

Yet in doing so, you are doing something to the whole of nature. When you achieve personal experience, or when a group or a collective achieves a collective process, you are at the same time enriching and adding to the whole of the natural world.

In a changed manner, in a later changed manner, you take the consciousness of all the things you consume into your body.

When you fulfill a personal intention, desire, or goal, and you gain a kind of personal experience, personal understanding, you inevitably consume many things in the process; you cannot achieve it otherwise. And when a group or an organization wants to achieve its overall process, it also consumes many things, and these things all come from the natural world, from nature. The things of nature that you consume, you also absorb their consciousness into your body. When you think you are using your own consciousness to achieve these goals, you are at the same time carrying the consciousness of all these myriad things to witness together, or to realize together, your experience and your creation. They also gain experience from your experience and from this process.

You are doing something to the whole of the natural world, and your doing lies right here: you carry all of these things together with you to achieve your goals. In other words, your success is also their success; without them there would be no you. In the medal of honor, half of it belongs to you, and half of it belongs to them.

Becoming Yourself and Perceiving the World

After those consciousnesses blend together, they perceive the world in the way that you become yourself. We people often say we want to become ourselves, right? Every single thing we do each day, isn't it all part of becoming ourselves? If we were to describe our life's journey in one sentence, it would be this process of becoming yourself, and in this way you perceive the world. These blended consciousnesses, in the way that you become yourself, perceive this world under your guidance.

Through your eyes, those beasts, those vegetables, those birds and animals, that dust, perceive the dawn and the sunlight at the same time as you.

Just as you perceive the sunset with its sky full of colorful clouds, or the sunrise with its golden light spreading everywhere, however you perceive this world, they perceive it the same way along with you. They perceive it through your eyes.

But from another perspective, these experiences are also your own. You might say, well, if you're bringing them all along to perceive, then which parts are mine? He says from another angle, these experiences are all yours as well. It's like you're bringing everyone along to perceive together, so this experience belongs both to others and to you. Let me give a not-quite-perfect analogy: a tour guide leads tourists up a mountain to watch the sunrise. At the moment the sun comes out, the guide feels the beauty and awe of nature just as you do. Even though the guide is the one who brought you there, would you say the guide doesn't have his own experience? That wouldn't be right either.

Language Is a Substitute for Direct Communication

Language emerged only when you began to lose direct communication with your own experience and with the experience of others.

This should be said to be true, and from a certain angle this is indeed true. When you can no longer communicate directly through consciousness and the inner senses, then you can only rely on language. Let me give a vivid example: if communication used to happen through telepathy, and now telepathy no longer works, then only language remains, so inevitably language comes into being.

Language is a substitute for direct communication, and you must remember this. The problem it sets out to solve is direct communication, but when direct communication no longer works, it uses language as a substitute.

The symbol of the written word represents your own or someone else's experience, and at the same time it separates you from those experiences.

The written word is a kind of symbolic representation. For example, if I say "mountain," an image of a mountain appears in your mind, and that is a symbolic representation. But is the mountain in your mind when I say "mountain" the same as the "mountain" in someone else's mind? Sometimes it is the same, sometimes it is not. If the two of you have gone together to see a particular mountain, then your understanding of that mountain may be the same. But if the mountains you have seen in your different life experiences are not the same, then when you say mountain and he says mountain, they may not be the same mountain. The mountain in the mind of a mountaineer is also not the mountain in your mind, right?

This symbol represents your own or someone else's experience, but it also separates you and others from that experience. When I say "mountain," I am speaking through a symbol, and this mountain becomes an abstract concept. In reality, you cannot feel the existence of that mountain in the way you would through the inner senses. You have not merged with the mountain's consciousness, you have not used your own consciousness to directly feel the mountain's feelings. You are only sensing the symbolic meaning of the mountain through an abstract symbol.

Vision and Images Are Symbols

He continued:

The visual information that you perceive is close to a visual language.

All visual information is very close to a visual language. This sentence is not so easy to understand. That is to say, the mountain you see with your eyes is already an external image-ization of the mountain's inner consciousness; it is no longer the mountain's essence. So the mountain you see is like the way a written character is a symbolic sign representing the mountain; the written character is an image symbol of the real mountain, and the picture of the mountain you see with your eyes, the image of the mountain, the visual image of the mountain, is also another kind of image symbol of the mountain's essence, and it is not the mountain's essence either.

So this written symbol and this image symbol, this visual symbol, the two are approximate, very close. Everything your gaze reaches, all the things of the world, the mountains and rivers and the earth, the natural scenery, are all like visual words and sentences — none of them are the essence of the natural world anymore; they are only a symbol of the natural world's essence. Because you are seeing with your eyes, rather than using your inner senses to feel them.

An object presents itself to your visual perception, so therefore you can safely perceive it from the outside.

You perceive it from the outside, and you no longer put your own consciousness onto that object. This is fast and simple. The objects you see are also symbolic signs. Just like words and language, behind them there must be the stream of consciousness you want to express, the emotion itself, but emotion needs words as a vehicle to present itself. And the essence of nature also needs to exist by means of the visual images of nature in your mind, such visual symbols. These visual symbols are not the essence of nature, just as words are not the essence of emotion; it is the same principle.

So all the things we see in the natural world are symbolic signs. This point goes back to what we discussed in Chapter 19 of Seth Speaks: in dreams there are all kinds of symbols, and at different levels of consciousness there are different symbolic objects. He also raised a point: at the outermost layer, the layer we consider the real world, the real world you see is actually also a kind of symbol. At that time many people left comments asking: why are the things of the natural world also symbols? Why are they not the true face of things? How can they be equated with the symbols in dreams? Now that we have reached this point today, can you thoroughly understand the meaning that symbol represents?

Ruburt's Strange State

He said, take a break, he told Jane to take a break. At 10:50, Jane had a strange feeling related to today's session. She felt somewhat disoriented, in the transmission of today's session, yet she could not clearly explain what kind of manner it actually was. While conveying the material, she made many long pauses. I pointed out some of the pauses marked in the article, but actually there were many more that he did not point out.

In the trance state, while Jane was speaking for Seth, she was completely unaware of these pauses. She would often stop for two or three minutes without speaking, just sitting there blankly, staring at Rob with empty eyes. Imagine someone chatting with you and suddenly going silent for several minutes, and you have no idea what is going on with them, and then after a few minutes they suddenly start speaking again. Jane was in this kind of state tonight.

Seth came to explain why Jane was like this:

Ruburt's strange feeling was indeed related to this evening's material. However briefly, he did actually become involved in a process.

What kind of process did he reach? One that allowed him to reach the level beneath spoken or visual language. That is, the words spoken by the mouth and the images in the mind. Images are also a kind of language; he reached the more essential thing beneath these two things.

In a manner of speaking, he approached another threshold of perception, and he went beyond the limitations of language and images, and with my help, transferred that information into the given data.

Seth said, I helped him a bit, transferring that deeper-level information, that data, into information that Jane could receive.

He took, so to speak, a long journey.

This long journey refers to a journey of consciousness, because his consciousness was no longer on the level where it usually resides; his consciousness had entered a deeper level. Although in the terms you recognize, it was not a conscious journey; in other words, this journey truly had no perception. His consciousness entered a deeper level, and on that level, his own conscious level did not understand, did not know that he had gone to such a place.

The training connected with your visual and verbal culture prevented a complete transfer.

Because on that level, he received information through direct perception, and the information of direct perception has already transcended the training of our visual images and spoken words. So at that time, Jane had no way to transfer that content back, and she also did not realize that she had been to that place; she did not know what she was doing, because she could not use human consciousness to understand it or describe it.

There are gaps in your perception.

In the midst of our perception, between consciousness and consciousness, there are gaps. If you do not understand this, you can look again at Chapter 18 of Seth Speaks, which discusses the stages of consciousness — consciousness is divided into several stages, and there are gaps in between. He said:

That is actually filled with information.

The places you consider blank in consciousness — this blank space between consciousness and consciousness — are filled with data, filled with information, only humans cannot obtain the information in between. And Ruburt let that information come together. So it can be said:

He will become more proficient.

He will be able to obtain information from that blank consciousness. Previously he could not; previously he could only obtain those feelings on the level of consciousness; now he can take out the information that fills those gaps, those blanks between consciousness and consciousness.

But for that reason, I will now end the session. Why? Because Jane has now entered this state. After entering this state, she already found verbal expression very difficult, which is why she paused for long stretches. During the pauses, Jane's consciousness had actually entered a deeper level, and on that level, it had already transcended our human perception of time. She did not know how long it took; she felt many, many things she could not perceive before. Maybe ten minutes, twenty minutes, she did not know how long, because that time no longer had any relation to our time. After she came back, she could not say it, could not describe it, and did not even realize where she had been.

Just now Rob said that when Jane was transmitting the Seth material, she would pause for long stretches, and during these pauses Jane was completely unaware; she did not know what she was doing, she just sat there staring with wide eyes. She herself did not realize that she had paused for a long time; on the level of her consciousness there was no pause; she went from one thought to the next, and those two minutes in between were just a gap in consciousness for her. She did not think there was a pause in between; if she had felt the pause was abnormal, she would have reacted long ago, saying, "Why did I stop for so long?"

This passage is Seth explaining what was happening with Jane during this process. She already possessed a certain ability in this regard, had become more proficient; she could obtain some information from those blank places in consciousness where information could not previously be obtained, only she still did not quite know how to transfer it out, because she had transcended language, transcended images, transcended all the ways humans have of transmitting information. If you blindfold your eyes and plug your ears, how do you obtain information? If your sense of touch is also bound up, so you cannot touch anything — on that level of consciousness, it is this kind of feeling, which is why he called it the blank of consciousness, the gap of consciousness.

He felt as if his consciousness had been pulled and stretched out of line.

Like the feeling when a thread in a wool sweater comes loose — the consciousness was pulled too hard, and it simply snapped, the thread broke, and it could not even be connected again.

In a certain way, it was like using muscles in a new way.

You have not normally used your muscles this way, but when you use them in this manner, you feel strange. This was Jane's feeling — her consciousness was being used in a way it had not normally been used, just like when you use muscles you normally never use, or use your muscles in a completely different way.

Let him rest. In a way difficult to describe, he became aware of the distance of his own consciousness.

He knew his consciousness had gone traveling. On the psychic level:

He became somewhat familiar with that which lies beneath language, and with the unexpressed inner rhythms.

Because Seth happened to be talking about this; he often had Jane experience this thing while teaching. Seth is a practitioner; he does not just say the words and consider it done; while speaking, he had Jane feel it — what is meant by that which lies beneath words and language; he had her feel it.

And felt a strange connection between words and your sense of time.

In the process of perceiving this, she discovered a strange connection with our present sense of time, so that kind of pause was something she did not understand, and it confused her. Because this was a direct feeling, not information expressed through spoken or verbal language. Seth said this is direct feeling — he had Jane experience what direct feeling is.

He will soon readjust.

Ruburt will soon readjust and adapt to this new way of obtaining information. At this point he said once more, "The session is ended," and only then was it truly over.

At 11:25, Jane said:

I just felt strange, as if I existed in a place.

She said "existed in a place," and this feeling matches what Seth just said about Jane's consciousness going traveling — she went to a deeper level of consciousness. When she got there, she said it was too slippery, she could not grab hold of anything, which made her consciousness unable to grasp anything because it was too slippery. In any other place, your consciousness can grab onto something — you can see something, feel something, even if it is just a fragment of words, a flash like lightning before your eyes for an instant, you can capture some information. But in there, she seemed to have stayed for a long time, yet her consciousness grasped nothing. It is like an alien took you away, brought you around for a tour, and after you came back it seemed as if you had no memory at all, but you vaguely felt as if you had been somewhere, yet you could not remember what happened.

She said:

It was not easy for him to turn this feeling into words.

Very difficult, impossible to say. Yet she also said:

However, I felt as if I had been doing something there all along.

She felt as if she had been doing things there, working there. So this sense of time is different from our perception — Rob may have only felt she paused for two minutes or one minute, but she felt she had gone to another place and seemed to be doing things there. She was indeed doing things — Seth said she was obtaining the information in those gaps of consciousness.

When Seth was speaking, I simultaneously perceived in a different way.

While Seth was transmitting, she perceived in a different way, not like the previous way. This is also what Seth said: Jane acquired a new ability; she could obtain direct information beneath language and images, obtaining information through direct feeling, rather than needing to obtain it through language or the stream of consciousness as before.

She could also perceive that:

Seth had reincarnated some now-forgotten experiences into the material of this moment.

She could perceive the deeper meaning of what Seth had just said, but that thing she had forgotten again. Jane's strange feeling had passed by the time we went to bed. The next morning she reported that she had had a dream experience that was brilliant and clear at the time, in which she perceived images or objects as language. She directly perceived visual images and the objects of our three-dimensional world as a kind of language. This was one of her new abilities. Why did it need to be turned into language? Because only by turning it into language could it be transmitted, could it be translated out. Previously she could not translate it out; now she had a bit of ability and could transfer part of it, but she still could not remember it very clearly.

Chapter Summary

This concludes the third part of the commentary on Chapter Six, and with it, Chapter Six itself. This chapter mainly discusses how human language came into being, what the essence of human language is, and why it is a symbolic system; at the same time, it points out that the objects we see with our eyes in this three-dimensional world, in the physical world, are themselves also symbols. This chapter is extremely important, because it fundamentally discusses the entire process of the emergence of language from the very beginning of humanity, and how the way ancient humans viewed the world and perceived the world differed from that of people today. The significance of this is very far-reaching.

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注释与核实

1. The Peony Pavilion, a Ming dynasty play by Tang Xianzu. ↩

2. A Buddhist saying: one flower, one world; one leaf, one bodhi. ↩

3. A common Buddhist metaphor: the sands of the Ganges, each grain a world. ↩

4. Source: Jane Roberts, Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976) (https://openlibrary.org/books/OL4890737M/Psychic_politics) ↩

5. This claim could not be verified. ↩

6. According to Mike's original words, "They could already see the changes in the waves of the seawater, but their eyes still could not see these ships."; upon verification, this should be "This is a modern legend known as 'invisible ships,' and it is fabricated: Columbus's log records that the Taíno people saw the fleet immediately and actively swam out and paddled canoes to trade. The plot of 'first seeing the ripples of the waves, then the shaman leading everyone to see the ships' comes from the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!?, and has no historical or scientific basis." (Source: Wikipedia, "Invisible ships," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_ships) ↩

7. Source: "The Diamond Sutra (Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita Sutra)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Sutra) ↩

8. This claim could not be verified. ↩ ↩² ↩³