The "Guide" and "Key Points" for 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 portions Mike read aloud).
Introduction
This chapter uses the earth and its landforms as a metaphor for counterparts of the psyche, and then uses a mountain as a metaphor: the mountaintop represents the present, the rock strata represent past lives, the mountain is not equal to any single stratum, and the past and present exist simultaneously and influence each other. Seth also uses the fetus, language, trees, and cells to explain that the past and future exist simultaneously, that the future draws life from the past, that the body and cells know probabilities through a more precise inner language, and that language limits the perception of the future.
Key Points of This Chapter
- The psyche sends out counterparts, just as the earth distributes its attributes through different landforms; all consciousnesses of the same era are connected to one another.
- The mountain analogy shows that: the mountaintop represents the present, and the rock strata represent past lives; the mountain is not equal to any single stratum, and past and present exist simultaneously and influence each other.
- Every consciousness is indispensable within its own time and place; past and future live simultaneously within layer upon layer of consciousness.
- The fetus, the seed, and the tree are all dealing with probabilities; the future draws life from the past, and the present is sustained by both past and future together.
- Language limits the perception of the future, but the body and cells use a more precise inner language; trees also have consciousness and can perceive people through vibration and sound.
Main Text
After a pause for the holidays, we continue with The "Unknown" Reality, Volume 2, Part Six. The title of this part is "Reincarnation and Counterparts: The 'Past' Seen Through the Mosaics of Consciousness," with "past" in quotation marks.
Today we are covering Session 727, titled "The Reincarnational Self, Counterparts, and Time. The Mountain Analogy, the Fetus, History, and Probabilities." This session began on Monday, January 6, 1975, at 9:11 p.m. The previous session was on December 16, 1974, close to Christmas, and in between they were probably busy with the holidays, so no sessions were held. After the turn of the year, once the New Year had passed, this was their first session. Rob said it had been three weeks since they had held a session; everyone was busy with the holidays, and they had not even noticed that Seth had already finished Part Five. During that same period, our inner explorations also came to a complete stop — they no longer did those exercises, as if they had been covered by a stage curtain. They had not yet shown any sign of returning, but I missed the process of exploring that unknown reality very much.
The Analogy Between the Earth and the Psyche
At the beginning of this session, Seth says:
In your terms, the earth changes over time. Mountains and islands all rise up, emerging from the oceans, then disappear again, and new forms appear.
Seas turn into mulberry fields, and mulberry fields turn back into seas. In the span of earthly time known to humanity, this has happened countless times already.
Yet through all these changes, the earth maintains a landscape, and at any given time, for your purposes, the face of the earth is fairly reliable and eternal.
From our human perspective, the earth is eternal and fairly reliable with respect to the history of human development. Although continents sink and disappear, then disappear and sink again, to humans it is eternal.
In the previous session I talked about islands rising up from the ocean floor. While those conversations between islands were taking place, the islands themselves were also changing. Volcanic islands can also turn into fertile land. Seth says, in much the same way:
The psyche sends out its own counterparts, each with a different face and characteristics, just as the physical attributes of the earth are distributed in a given fashion over the surface of their own planet.
The human psyche also sends out its counterparts, just as the various landscapes on earth are all different -- there are deserts, grasslands, fertile fields, marshes, wetlands, forests. For the psyche, its counterparts can be compared to the earth's landscapes: the attributes of the earth's psyche, through different terrains, treat each region as a counterpart.
Just as in any given period and era, all physical things are connected, so every consciousness existing in individual terms is also connected to every other.
In any historical period, the land and oceans on earth are all connected to one another. From this angle, all consciousnesses existing on this earth, at any given time, are also connected to one another.
The Mountain Analogy: The Summit and the Rock Strata
Next, Seth uses a mountain as an analogy:
A mountain is composed of many layers of rock that serve as its foundation. The top of the mountain represents your present, which has been pushed up from below by the mountain-building forces, and the layers of rock beneath it represent your past.
Layer upon layer stacked upward, and the summit is your present. But:
The mountain itself is not any one of the rock strata that seem to compose it.
The mountain is made up of rock strata, but the strata are not the mountain. The term "mountain" is what you use to refer collectively to all these strata plus the soil and vegetation on top. Broadly speaking, the mountain and everything that composes it exist simultaneously.
You can examine the different layers of the rock structure. In terms of time, geologists can determine when those sediments were formed—they will tell you which geological age the mountain's rocks belong to; that is a matter for archaeologists to study. But:
At the same time, the rocks themselves still exist in the geologist's present.
Otherwise they would have no way to carry out such examinations. Without these underlying strata, the mountain would not exist. Yet again, the mountain is not any one of those strata.
In much the same way, the self you know is the mountain, and the strata that formed it are your past lives.
You are not any of those past selves, nor are you the you of your previous lives:
Even though they are part of the history of your existence, they exist simultaneously with your own life, just as the rock strata exist simultaneously with the mountain.
However, your present existence is very much related to those other aspects of yourself. In what way?
Then what happens at the mountaintop affects everything that happens below. Everything you do affects those other realms of the self, and there is a constant, ongoing interchange.
In terms of physical properties, the material conditions in the valley, at the foot of the mountain, and at the summit may be quite different; the climate and vegetation may vary considerably. Yet all the life and vegetation in that region are interrelated. Every layer of life that composes the mountain is equally effective and equally important, each on its own level, focused on its own reality.
So then, in terms of the present, you have a history that is both you and not you. It does not control you, because with every thought and action you are still changing it.
Just as every movement at the mountaintop affects the base, you have an influence on your own past. And the layers below are also constantly changing; your history is always changing. So this is an interrelated gestalt, a whole. The past affects the present, and the present affects the past.
The Unique Position of Each Consciousness
In the physical world, islands, valleys, plateaus, continents, and oceans each occupy their own place, forming the physical foundation of your reality:
So every consciousness, no matter how small, is indispensable in its own time and place.
Every flower on the hillside looks out with its own unique view of the world, and every consciousness does the same, fulfilling a position that no other consciousness can fill. Everyone should understand this point: why do we have so many reincarnations, so many personages? It is because each person stands at a different angle, and sees things from a different viewpoint. Just as every flower in this world looks out from its own position, the position it occupies is one no one else has, and its angle is unique.
Speaking only in terms of time, there is an archaeological significance hidden within your own essence.
What is meant by archaeological significance? It means that your history is all within your essence. If you want to discover it, you have to look downward -- just as when you stand on a mountaintop and want to see the history of the mountain, you have to look down into the layers of rock within it. Through the various levels of your existence, you go and find your own various levels. In your world, that represents your own past history, from which you have emerged.
But spiritually speaking, you are not those selves. This is like how physically your body is not your parents' body -- your body is certainly your own, it cannot be your parents', yet it was given to you by your parents. The difference between you and those reincarnational selves is the same as the difference between you and your parents:
Even though you share certain backgrounds and characteristics.
You have emerged from that history, just as you have emerged from your parents. You cannot say that because you emerged from there, you are him, and he is you -- those are two different things. You emerged from it, but you are not it; you are uniquely yourself. Yet you share some basic environments and common characteristics -- your parents belong to a larger family, and you are influenced by the entire family and home environment, which for you is the most primary, the most initial environmental condition.
You can easily see how within your lifetime you influence your parents. Although they are older than you, you also influence them. In the same way, you also influence your reincarnational family. Since you can influence your parents who are older than you -- although from your perspective they are people who existed on this earth before you, they are your history, and before they gave birth to you there was no you in this world -- yet after you are born, you can change them. Then in the same way, can you also influence those people who are no longer in this world? Seth says that in the same way, you are also influencing them. This is a completely new viewpoint.
Rainwater Flows Down the Mountain
When it rains:
Water rushes down the mountain with tremendous abundance, bringing life and vitality to all parts of the mountain.
If you have ever seen rain on a mountain, the water flows everywhere, in every direction. In much the same way:
Your own experience flows downward, into the crevices of all the other eras and centuries that make up your present life.
Your present is the mountaintop, and the layers of rock below are your past — even your parents, your grandparents, your ancestors are also your history. When it rains, the water on the mountain keeps flowing downward, and it can flow all the way down beneath the rock layers. This example tells you that your experience also flows from top to bottom, flowing down into your past history.
You Think You Are at the Mountaintop
Next Seth is going to tell us something astonishing. I have been saying that you seem to be at the mountaintop, because obviously from where you stand, you appear to be at the top. But:
Conversely, your viewpoint and your focus make you think you are at the mountaintop, so much so that you cannot turn your head to see anything higher.
You can only look down; you cannot see your future. If the mountaintop is your present, and below the mountain is your past, then looking higher up, wouldn't that be your future? But you cannot see anything higher. Seth says:
Perhaps you are a rather nice, sunlit ledge jutting out from the side of the mountain, overlooking the valley below, without realizing that the mountain itself continues to exist above you.
Perhaps you are only a ledge on the side of the mountain, with sunlight shining on it, and you think you are the highest point, because you cannot see that far behind you, the mountain still has its heights above.
You are already positioned at a lower level, while other levels also think they are at the mountaintop, looking only downward. The levels below you also think they are at the mountaintop; they cannot see the existence above them. Although you stand above them, and you can see that they are your past, those past selves always feel that they are in the present. They can see neither their future nor you, so they also think they are at the mountaintop. In other words, every stratum feels that it is at the mountaintop.
You are convinced that you cannot see the future, so you cannot see anything higher. You cannot look upward beyond your own era; you can only look downward. When you are in that kind of situation:
You will forever think that reincarnation happens in the past.
Actually, it is exactly the opposite. Think about it: every level of existence, every stratum, occurs simultaneously.
Fetus and the Future
Physically, the human fetus remembers its past—it remembers where it came from, and in your terms, it traveled through and reached the evolutionary stages prior to its human form. But it reached that form because it was responding to a future time, to a future self that had not yet been concretely created.
Before conception, the fetus itself was responding to that self which was not yet physically apparent. In your terms, the future draws new life from the past. This sentence is not easy to understand: how is it that the future draws new life from the past? Because before conception, from our perspective, is that the past? Yes. But the infant itself begins to respond to a future body of its own that has not yet come into being—that is to say, it will set in motion the process of conception. According to this way of putting it, that future, not-yet-formed blueprint of the little baby drew life from the past process of conception. It may even have arranged the meeting of its parents—you never thought of that, did you.
So what this sentence means is: you assume the past determines the future, but actually it is the future that draws life from the past. Because it wants such a body, wants this particular incarnation, it has to borrow a sperm from its father, borrow an egg from its mother, and bring itself into birth within its mother's womb. This is the future reaching back into the past to ask for things.
A reality of your own, a concept in the unformed future that has not yet been materialized, reaches down into the past and brings that future into realization.
In terms of time and space:
Cells are imprinted with physical data, and that data comes from a nonphysical, immaterial world in which time and space are formed.
Cells carry memory and chromosomes—you can call it DNA or whatever—but this DNA comes from a nonphysical reality, what we call an inner blueprint, and all cells also come from that inner blueprint.
The knowledge of possibilities brings about present time and the present moment.
Your present world, your present time, all come about because of your knowledge of possibilities. If there were no possibilities, there would be no present practice, no present reality. Our present world emerges out of all the possibilities.
Through the voice of genes and chromosomes, the future and the past are connected in a balancing force you call the present.
Through genes and chromosomes, the past and the future are both balanced within your present state. It holds the past with one hand and the future with the other, and only then can it keep you in a stable balance in the present. If the past and the future were not both acting at the same time, your present would not exist either.
Once again:
The history of your personal psyche, and the mass experience of your species, resides within each individual of every person.
The history of your personal spiritual development—including how many reincarnations you have had—and the history of your entire species, that is, of humanity, all of this history resides within each individual person. Every person has a backup copy, every cell has a backup copy.
The archaeology of the past and the future alike lives within the layers of consciousness that make up your existence.
The past is easy to understand as archaeology. Why is the future also archaeology? He uses this word to break down your limitations of time and space. The past and the future exist simultaneously, both within your layers of consciousness.
Language as History
Seth continued:
In many ways, your language itself is a history that you do not understand.
In terms of time, the past is clearly embedded in words and sentences. When you speak a word, you may not know the history of how it has changed over the years—unless you are an expert in linguistics or classical studies, you do not know the evolution of this word or this term, yet you speak it perfectly. Not everyone needs to understand, like a master, the historical development of every Chinese character in ancient times in order to speak; you just speak according to what you know now.
You seldom think that the present state of your language, whatever it is, will one day seem like an ancient version to others.
You have not thought that the language you consider a product of the present day will one day seem like an antique to others. If future humans all use telepathy, then humans of that time will not understand: how could people communicate through something as clumsy as language, with so little information, and incapable of accurately depicting all our feelings? It would be like us one day mastering quantum computers and then discovering we were still using an abacus to calculate.
What is especially important is this:
In your terms, language presupposes a certain development of the mind, and when you think of language, you connect the two together.
Human intelligence has developed to where it is today, and you think there is no better means of communication than language. Actually, you have not considered that this is merely the result of the human mind developing in one particular direction. When humans use language, it means we are only using one particular developmental capacity of the mind, while the mind's other capacities, because we use language, have been shut off. The point of saying this is: the mind has many directions of development; it is not limited to just one.
There are languages and words that have nothing to do with the thought as you understand it. There are languages that communicate in a far more precise manner.
The language we now master is expressed through logical thought, but there are also languages that have nothing to do with human thought as we know it; they are not expressed through thought. And in those cases, they communicate in ways far more precise than human language.
For example:
The communication between cells is indeed far more precise than the vocabulary of any language.
Is the transmission between cells a language? You think not; you think it is neural conduction. But is the content it transmits a language? It is far more precise than human language. Human language is extremely singular, and its information capacity is very insufficient. The speed of human speech is about 200 to 300 words per minute1; any faster and although you can speak, others will have difficulty listening, so the speed of human language is very slow. The speed at which our brains process information is also very slow—about 200 units of information per second2 is considered acceptable—yet the actual computational processing capacity of our brains reaches at least 200 billion operations per second or more3, possibly even beyond that—but the input and output systems to the outside are very weak. Is the transmission between cells, for example between the brain cells in your head, similar to language? Of course it is; otherwise where would your language come from? If what is transmitted between your brain cells were not language, where would your language come from? Yet the speed at which it transmits is much faster than your speech.
Communicating data so complex that all of your languages fall far short of this complexity. This communication carries data that a thousand letters could not transfer.
In this way:
One part of the body knows what is happening in every other part, and the body as a whole knows its precise position on the surface of the planet.
It does not need GPS, does not need positioning, does not need today's satellite systems. Every body knows its precise position on the surface of the Earth—this is something we had not thought of before. Even with GPS today, we have not yet reached such a precise state.
Biologically, it knows all the life forms surrounding it, down to the most minute categories.
This body knows all the life forms surrounding it, including cells, the bacteria around it, microorganisms, down to the most minute categories.
This applies to the future as it applies to the past. The body itself knows the sources of water and food, for example. Natives, unacquainted with your technology, as well as wild animals, have done very well in exploring the life of our earth and their position within it.
You say, how could that be—how could humans know their precise position? You think this is nonsense, right? Fine, let us give a counterexample. You think humans are far smarter than birds, yet birds, in the course of migrating thousands of kilometers, can fly with great accuracy—if they did not have this ability, how could they find their former home over a flight of thousands of kilometers? How could they fly thousands of kilometers and still find the nest under the eaves of your house? Is that positioning precise or not? Once you can understand how they position themselves, you will know that humans also have this ability. But we humans do not have this perceptual system—our body knows, our cells know, but our own brain consciousness does not know. This is a very subtle thing.
Those natives without technological development, and wild animals, are far smarter than humans when it comes to finding food and water sources. How do they know? You say they smell it? That is absurd. Nearby things can be smelled, but how do you smell something far away? It is not through scent. Take the story of the old horse knowing the way—no need to elaborate. When Xuanzang went to the West to obtain the scriptures, I mean the real history, not Journey to the West. At that time, Xuanzang's departure from the country was an illegal border crossing, and a very good local friend gave him an old horse. He did not understand at the time why he was given an old horse, but later, when he was lost in the desert without water or food, this old horse led him to a water source a day or two's journey away4. So regarding the matter of humans positioning themselves on the surface of their own planet, there is no need for further doubt—it is just that you are not aware of it. There are too many examples like this, including dolphins, and the migratory spawning of fish.
Trees, Seeds, and the Nature of Probabilities
When a simple tree surges forward and produces new seeds:
It is dealing with the nature of probabilities.
What is meant by the nature of probabilities? It means that, among all probabilities, it selects the one most likely to be realized. In this process, it constantly calculates, and inner communication involves an inner language that knows no symbols and no causes -- the entire process by which a tree grows and produces new seeds is carried out through a vast amount of inner calculation and linguistic communication, in a language we do not understand.
In your terms, the tree knows a history of its present and future, but what it understands is a future that has not been predetermined in advance, not a fated future.
The future it understands is not a future written in stone. Seth has always used the word "blueprint," but the blueprint is not a dead blueprint; it is a living blueprint -- and that blueprint is also something it constructs itself, as it feels its own power in the present.
Broadly speaking, the seeds of the tree also understand that there is a future out there, the many and varied futures toward which they grope.
It knows there is a future out there, and it moves toward that future by groping. That future has many versions, and it gropes its way forward among countless possibilities. The fetus also understands that its future is one among many probabilities; it responds to the stimulus of one of them, and then rushes toward the future of that possibility which brought the stimulus, choosing that future as its blueprint.
So you too, unconsciously, in one way or another, grope toward the probable futures that beckon you forward.
You grope for them, you explore them, you choose your future, but you also choose your past.
Inner Language and the Tyrant of Time
Seth says he can only go so far here, because:
Since I am using a spoken kind of language, that in itself makes time a tyrant.
He has to speak within time, so within this spoken language, time is the greatest tyrant.
The book, however, is paced in such a way that if you follow it, your inner language will be activated. That in itself will annihilate your concepts of subservience, and release you from time's iron grasp.
Some of the exercises given in this part will be designed toward that purpose. This book has its own inner structure and arrangement of sequence; if you follow that sequence, it will automatically activate your inner language. It is just that magical. As Seth has said before, he is speaking on different levels simultaneously, to your outer thinking and logic, and to the direct feelings of your inner psyche. When you listen to the Seth material, he is not only speaking to your ears and your brain; he is even speaking to your psyche, to that unknown, larger part of you. In the process of this speaking, he activates the inner language. This activation itself will annihilate some of your concepts of subservience, and then release you from time's iron grasp -- you will not be tightly seized by time; you can look at these questions from above time. Previously you were passively swept along by time; he says the exercises designed in this part are meant to achieve this purpose, to let you break free from within time. Time is the hardest of all forms to break through.
Fossils and the Living Past
When an archaeologist or a geologist examines old rock strata, he will find fossils that have already died. From your point of view, when you stand on a mountaintop looking down, looking at your psyche, you will also discover past lives that have already died. You will seem to be looking at reincarnational existences that have already ended, just as a geologist only finds motionless fossils buried in rock.
But:
Those fossils are still alive, except that the geologist has not tuned in to the area in which they are alive.
The reincarnational lives are still occurring, and they are also alive. But they are part of your existence, yet they are not you, and you are not your reincarnational past.
To a future self who is no more enlightened than you are:
You appear to be dead and lifeless, a dim memory.
If the future you is at the same level of cognition as the present you, then when the future you looks at the present you, you are already dead. But you are clearly alive right now, so you have become their memory.
When you look outward into this universe from your point of view, it seems as if you are looking into the past. As scientists say, when you look at light coming from a very distant galaxy, that galaxy may already be dead. In the same way:
When you look back into the psyche of life, you will dimly see past lives that have already vanished.
Those stars are too far away from us, and the light they emit may have taken hundreds of millions or billions of years to reach Earth. When we see their starlight, at the time point corresponding to where they are, they may have long since perished—exploded, disintegrated, and reformed into nebulae. So everything we see is already something from the past—you are seeing a living thing from the past, but in fact it is already dead.
What Seth is trying to tell you with this statement is to break your illusion: when you see living things, such as stars twinkling, you think they are alive, but in fact they are already dead; when you look at dead things, such as fossils, you think they are dead, but in fact they are still alive. Do not use your own judgment to judge these things.
Why do scientists' instruments not allow you to look into the future? Why do they not let you see worlds that have not yet been born? Since they work so well in discerning the past—if our instruments can work so well at looking at the past.
Why Can't You See the Future
Why can't we see the future? We can even see stars from billions of years in the past, so why can't we see even one second into the future? You have all these ideas about reincarnation, yet you know so little about future lives—why is that? What he means is: if your scientists are so advanced, if they can see the past so accurately, so far, and over such long spans, why can't you see the future at all?
Seth says the answer is that your language is limited. The answer lies in our language; our language limits us. Just as he said earlier, the reason lies in our language. So we might say language is both our making and our undoing. The invention of human language has actually liberated us enormously, but language has also limited our development. This matter can only be viewed from both sides.
Our language is limited. Your verbal language, because in your biological communication, is quite aware of probable futures, and the body often maintains itself within a labyrinth of probabilities.
Your body's cells know the future, but you don't. On the biological level, on the cellular level, they know, but on the conscious level you don't. So your body often maintains itself within a labyrinth of probabilities, and within this labyrinth there is no concept of time and space. The body has its own time-space perspective, not subject to our human time-space limitations; yet we humans, on the conscious level, do have time-space limitations. So your body is somewhat puzzled—the body knows the future, but your consciousness doesn't know the future.
Rob's Note: On the Material About Trees
The spoken portion of this session ends here. After giving late-night material on other matters, Seth ended the session at 11:12. What follows are some notes by Rob, mentioning the material Seth gave about infants. You can look it up; in the appendix you will find excerpts from Sessions 503 to 504. Rob said that when Seth was discussing this material, it reminded him of what Seth had said in the 18th session of the early sessions, on January 22, 1964, material that he would never forget.
What did Seth say that he would never forget? He said:
As for the tree that is truly felt to have a consciousness, of course that is the truth. The tree is, in a manner of speaking, in a state of dissociation; on the one hand it is in a drowsy state, and on the other hand it can pour part of its energy into functioning as a tree.
This state of the tree, if I must describe it to you, is like a person who has lost his soul—what does it mean to be a person who has lost his soul? It is like a person in a vegetative state. This term is well chosen—why do we say that a person who has lost his soul is called a vegetable? The state of a plant is precisely the state of dissociation. You cannot say it has no reaction at all; it has some reaction, basically present; but can you say its reaction is very strong? Not really.
The tree's inner senses have a strong alliance with the attributes of the earth itself.
Trees can communicate with the earth through their own inner senses. They feel themselves growing, just as you listen to your heartbeat—they can hear the sound of their own growth, just as you can hear the sound of your heartbeat. Because they have a connection with the earth, they are in constant communication.
They also often experience pain, and it is clearly definite discomfort, and sometimes even agonizing.
Trees also feel pain, but it is not the kind of pain we imagine; it is a discomfort, even agonizing, but exceptionally definite. But it is not the kind of concrete emotional quality of pain that you might feel—it is somewhat like your breath suddenly being cut off. The pain that animals feel is somewhat like the breath suddenly being cut off; it does not carry a great deal of emotionality, but it carries great suffering, great discomfort, like the neck being gripped.
A tree also knows people; it can sense the presence of a person through the vibrations in the air as we walk past, striking the trunk at different distances, and even through things like sound. The tree does not build up an image of an individual person, but it does build up a composite character representing a person.
A tree does have perception of a person, but it is not as we imagine, able to form a human image in its consciousness. It forms cognition through perception. When we humans walk past the tree, the vibration of the air—if we think of air as a liquid substance with density, then this wave, or rather this vibrational wave of the liquid, will travel to the trunk of the great tree. The trunk can keenly sense the differences in these air vibrations, and through this it knows who has come. It can also sense you through your voice—whether it is the sound of your footsteps vibrating on the earth, or the sound of your speaking, or the sounds your body emits from within—the great tree can sense all of it. Through these different sensations—the vibration of the air, the sounds you make, the earth's feeling of your vibrations—it synthesizes them into a kind of sensation, and it forms this sensation into one that corresponds completely to you as an individual. It knows that this one is you, that one is him, that one is another person; it can distinguish the differences between people, but it cannot build up an image of a person. Likewise, a tree will recognize the same person who passes by it every day. If a person passes by this tree every day, it will know that that person has come again.
Jane's Poem "The Tree in the Forest"
Rob said that Jane wrote the following poem in early 1964, but he wasn't sure whether it was before or after Session 18. At least as far as he was concerned, which came first didn't matter -- he said he liked the poem just as much as he liked that session. The poem is called "The Tree in the Forest":
The tree in the forest stands secret and silent. Their voices, suspended in lungs made of leaves.
It is standing quietly. What it means is: when the leaves move, do they make a rustling sound? It takes that rustling sound made by the leaves and considers it to be the sound made by the tree's lungs -- and the tree's lungs are made of leaves.
That can only whisper softly of latent dreams, Breathing but once in a million years. The moss and the pebbles are sleeping so soundly. The grass and the meadow stand waiting in a trance. Footsteps come, footsteps go, But no sound can break that green-eyed trance.
"Green-eyed trance" refers to that green tree. Jane still had her own special mysticism and liveliness in it. She didn't understand this thing through the logical thinking we imagine; she directly captured, through a kind of perception and a kind of feeling, those places in the Seth material that could move her. So after she heard Seth's description of the tree in Session 18 of the Early Sessions, she wrote this poem. But she wasn't sure whether she wrote the poem after hearing that session, or whether she had already written it before hearing the session. Rob said it didn't matter, and indeed it no longer matters.
注释与核实
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According to Mike's original words, "Human speech is about 200 to 300 words per minute"; upon verification, it should be "Typical speech rates for individuals without speech-language impairments vary by task: conversation is about 150 to 250 words per minute, and reading paragraphs aloud is about 160 to 170 words per minute." (Source: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Promise of Assistive Technology to Enhance Activity and Work Participation, 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK453284/) ↩
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This claim could not be verified. ↩
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Source: Sandra Ackerman, Discovering the Brain, 1992 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234153/?report=reader) ↩
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According to Mike's original words, "The old horse led him to a water source one or two days' journey away"; upon verification, it should be "The old horse turned onto another path, and after traveling several li it found green grass; the pool was about ten paces beyond the grass, not one or two days' journey away." (Source: Huili and Yancong, A Biography of the Tripitaka Master of the Great Ci'en Monastery of the Great Tang Dynasty, https://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/sutra/chi_pdf/sutra20/T50n2053.pdf) ↩