“Give us a moment … Speaking historically in your terms, man first identified with nature, and loved it, for he saw it as an extension of himself even while he felt himself a part of its expression. In exploring it he explored himself also. He did not identify as himself alone, but because of his love, he identified also with all those portions of nature with which he came into contact. This love was biologically ingrained in him, and is even now biologically pertinent.

…Generally you experience the self as isolated from nature, and primarily enclosed within your skin. Early man did not feel like an empty shell, and yet selfhood existed for him as much outside of the body as within it. There was a constant interaction. It is easy to say to you that such people could identify, say, with the trees, but an entirely different thing to try to explain what it would be like for a mother to become so a part of the tree underneath which her children played that she could keep track of them from the tree’s viewpoint, though she was herself far away.

Consciousness is far more mobile than you realize. Operationally, you have focused yours primarily with the body. You cannot experience subjective behavior “from outside,” so this natural mobility of consciousness, which for example the animals have retained, is psychologically invisible to you.

…I am certainly putting this in the most simple of terms, but a bird may have a nest, though it leaves it frequently and never confuses itself with its nesting place. In a manner of speaking that is what you have done, though the body is more animate than the nest.

…To explore that exterior world was to explore the inner one. Such a person, however, walking through the forest, also felt that he or she was also a portion of the inner life of each rock or tree, materialized. Yet there was no contradiction of identities.

A man might merge his own consciousness with a running stream, traveling in such a way for miles to explore the layout of the land. To do this he became part water in a kind of identification you can barely understand — but so did the water then become part of the man.”

—NotP Chapter 6: Session 774, May 3, 1976