“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There were “modern,” or highly sophisticated civilizations, utilizing some technology, long before the dates given for the invention of writing (about 3100 BC). Writing was invented and reinvented the art lost, then reemerging.

There were languages then long before your earliest evidence of them, and in written form. Your civilization is organized around science and technology, and generally speaking, now, the arts and other schools of knowledge have been largely subsidiary. Long before the time of the Egyptians, now, there were sophisticated societies, utilizing some technologies and advanced in the arts of writing. But these civilizations were not organized around technology, so that the technological advances, while highly sophisticated, were not pursued with the same diligence as in your time, and they were considered novelties—playthings for the wealthy, advanced toys, but not considered in a serious light.

There were several such civilizations, some mainly agriculturally oriented, and in those technology was applied, but generally only for that purpose—to increase agricultural yield. Some were religiously oriented. Some were socially oriented, enjoying a kind of comradeship that would find, for example, television’s impersonal communications a mockery of the give-and-take that they enjoyed in personal contacts.

One or two societies had microfilm, but microfilm needs another technological society for its interpretation, where scrawls upon a rock endure physically, to be interpreted by any onlooker.

There were electric batteries (as we’ve read lately; see my files). There were airplanes (files). There was not a technological organization however as you know it, so that the technological achievements were considered somewhat in a fashion that your society now considers fine art—esthetic, to be collected by the wealthy, delightful, good for collectors but not particularly practical. The aura of the mind of man simply had a different cast.

Reading was generally accepted. Books were numerous, but reading was done in the daytime. Technology was considered a plaything. Airplanes were not generally used. They were novelties. People identified so with the earth, they could see no reason for fast travel. There were automobiles, again considered as fanciful, technological art.

(10:04.) In one way or another, the race played with technology through the ages, in a subsidiary manner. Almost any of your modern inventions at one time or another existed on the face of the earth in the past, in your terms. Sometimes in a developed manner, or simply in plan form, but never in the same organized domineering fashion.

Give us a moment.... Beside all of that, there were cultures advanced enough for space travel, before the numbering of your geological ages. But even those did not organize life about technology in the way that you do. In the tangled areas of time, in one way or another, messages were left from one group of civilizations to another, whether they could be read at once, or not for centuries.