“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Chapters 16 and 17 in particular contain material on what Seth calls natural hypnosis, and on Western medicine, physicians, the suggestions associated with medical insurance and “health” literature, diet, childbirth, hospitals, natural death, good and evil, and so forth.

(That “earlier session” is the 687th, in Section 1, and in it Seth mentioned parallel man, probable man, and alternate man. [...]

(In a whisper:) Good evening.
 (“Good evening, Seth.”)

[...] Physicians are not the healthiest of men by far.⁴ Why do you think they can cure you?

Now: Your beliefs about what is desirable and what is not, what is good and what is evil, cannot be divorced from the condition of your body. Your own ideas of values can help you achieve good health or bring about disease, can bring into your experience success or failure, happiness or sadness. [...] You will have definite ideas about what success or failure means, or what good or evil is.

[...] If you think, “Aha, then from now on I will only think good thoughts — and therefore be healthy, and inhibit my ‘bad’ thoughts, or do anything at all with them but think them,” then in your own way you are doing what Augustus did. He began by believing that some of his thoughts were so evil that they must somehow be made nonexistent. [...]

HEALTH, GOOD AND BAD THOUGHTS, AND THE BIRTH OF “DEMONS”

Good evening.

In drawing up his list of so-called natural laws, I have said that man decided that what appeared to be cause and effect to him was therefore a natural law of the universe. [...] Therefore your tree recognizes a human being, though it does not see the human being in your terms. [...]

[...] Man lets his ego face the outer world as does the tree bark, and this is its purpose. [...] The tree bark makes allowances for good weather (here Jane pounded the table) though bad weather is repulsive to the bark. [...]

[...] This does not mean that you became dishonest in your relations with people, merely that you became large enough to contain the knowledge of good and evil in people, and to observe it as part of what is. [...]

The tree does not even build up an image of man, which is why this is difficult to explain. [...] Nevertheless the tree builds up a composite sensation which represents say an individual man. And the same tree will recognize the same man who passes it by each day. [...]

Without it, there would be no family groups, animal or human, or civilizations or governments. [...] The laws, however, are necessarily based upon man’s faith that those laws will indeed be largely followed. [...]

[...] There is faith in good, but there is also faith in “evil.” [...]

Good evening.

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

[...] So what happens often in your society when men or women have creative bents, and good minds to boot?

[...] The story says that Eve tempted the male, having him eat of the tree of good and evil, or the tree of knowledge. [...]

Good Evening.

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

[...] You have often misread such references, and many of your legends of good and evil spirits, monsters and strange varieties of artificial creatures, appear in folklore.

[...] Instead you included such cousins of consciousness into your midst, accepting a kind of comradeship—for to some extent at least you could see the different versions of humanity that resulted from a change of focus, an adjacent affiliation of humanized energy with the environment. [...]

[...] As you began to bring your own physical reality into harder, clearer focus, you stopped with your own view of human consciousness, shutting off completely and rather arbitrarily those other elements in order to more clearly frame and define the boundaries of physical order. [...]

You ended your classifications where you did, however, preferring to see man as the king of intelligence. [...]

[...] So what often happens in your society when men and women have creative bents, and good minds to boot?

[...] The story says that Eve tempted the male, having him eat of the tree of good and evil, or the tree of knowledge. [...]

Good evening.

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

[...] The mother had an absolute terror of cats, and considered them the personification of evil. [...] She was extremely unbalanced, the mother, emotionally, and considered her husband’s mother, who was a foolishly naive, good-natured and innocent thing, as a personification of evil.

[...] Her pace was good.)

Good evening.

(Good evening, Seth.)

Forget ideas of good and evil for our discussion. For one thing, men who perform seemingly evil acts but who believe those acts to be right and justified, can be carried along in relative safety for some time before their errors catch up with them, because the power of their own self-approval is so strong.

Now, good evening.

(“Good evening. [...]

This does not mean that they will not face consequences, but their self-approval provides a sturdy rudder that holds them often aloft, where most men might perhaps be drowning in the same circumstances. [...]

[...] Your ideas of good and evil affect not only your behavior with others, but your activity in a community and in the world at large.

If life is seen as good in this system of belief, then youth is viewed as the crowning glory, from which summit there is no further journey except descent. The old are not granted characteristics of wisdom, but feared as evil, bad, undesirable or frightening. [...]

[...] (Intently:) A black man who accepts the same system is indeed in difficulty. If he happens to be a poor black man he is in double jeopardy.

Good evening.

(To Nadine.) It often occurs that those who have strong healing abilities focus upon illness and sickness and are obsessed with it in the same way that many ministers, given to thoughts of good and God, are obsessed with the idea of the devil and evil. [...] If you will forgive me, it is somewhat like a woman with very earthly desires, but strong abilities in that line, who rigorously refuses to use them and dwells instead on thoughts of their evil, holding them back simply because she realizes they are so strong. [...]

[...] In the beginning you were stricken by poverty, but taken in by a wealthy man in a town within this province. There you performed as a young man household chores but learned the flute from the younger son of the family. [...] For some years, however, while you were financially secure yourself, you could not support them, and they were let out to the house of another wealthy man. [...]

[...] Now, I am going to drink some of this, though it is not good brandy. It is good wine, but it is not good brandy. [...]

Now I bid you all good evening, and I bid a particular good evening to an old friend who has not been here in some time. [...]

[...] It takes a while to understand who and what you are, and while you are learning it is often very handy to have someone else tell you and say you are this and so, you can do this and this and this and this is good and this is bad, as you indeed tell children. And so you do not have to ask yourself questions and you do not, yourself, have to probe the nature of good and evil because you accept what has been told you. [...]

[...] You were like a child with a new toy, and how could it be as good as you supposed and where was the hidden blemish, and so you have been looking for the hidden blemish. [...]

[...] I was a young man and my hair was longer than yours, but I wore lace about mine. [...]

[...] Until you can honor and love yourselves you cannot honor nor love anything else or anyone else, and as long as you see yourselves as guilty, then you will see guilt in every other person you look at, and you will see evil in the nature of reality. [...]

[...] As James said in Ruburt’s book,¹ “The universe is of good intent.” It is automatically predisposed, again, toward the creation of “good” events. I put the word “good” in quotes for now because of your misconceptions about the nature of good and evil, which we will discuss somewhat later.²

2. Jane and I are really looking forward to Seth’s material on man’s “misconceptions about the nature of good and evil.” [...]

[...] He is very active now on other levels, and is putting our material to good use. A fond good evening.

Good evening.

[...] One emotion is not good and another one evil.

Now give us a good long moment. [...]

A man or woman who knows hate also understands the difference between that emotion and love. [...]

[...] Often such people are highly creative, with good reserves of energy, but caught between highly contrasting beliefs, either of good and evil, or power and weakness. [...]

[...] Usually, such an idealized inner self comes from the acceptance of highly distorted beliefs—again, concerning good and evil. [...] The qualities considered good are attracted to the superior self as if it were a magnet. [...]

[...] [Two of the men were so strongly affected by the heat inside their heavy protective clothing that they decided to cut short their trip.] The reactor reclamation task is now projected to cost more than $760 million, and to take at least five years.

Good evening.

[...] To go ahead creatively, forming new versions of a spiritual reality, to state that man and his impulses were good, brought him finally into direct conflict with the old beliefs of the Sinful Self, whose value system was based upon the idea that the self was indeed sinful, not to be trusted. [...]

[...] It can be told now what it yearned to be told then—that it was indeed good, and not bad or evil, that it could indeed use its curiosity without the threat of abandonment, and that it could trust its own creativity and love of play. [...]

[...] Children want to “be good.” [...] The Sinful Self identification is a particularly unfortunate one, for to “be good” means that the child must consider itself bad or sinful. [...]

Good evening. [...]

I am not here specifically blaming Christianity, for far before its emergence, your ideas (underlined) and beliefs about good and evil [were] far more important in all matters regarding the species than any simple questions of genetic variances, natural selection, or environmental influence. In man’s case, at least, the selection of who should live or die was often anything but natural. If you are to understand the characteristics of the species, then you cannot avoid the study of man’s consciousness.

In a fashion man also is equipped with the ability to initiate actions on a nonphysical level that then become physical and continue to wind in and out of (pause) both realities, entwining dream events with historic ones, in such a fashion that the original nonphysical origins [are] often forgotten. Man overlays (underlined) the true reality quite spontaneously. [...] This applies individually and collectively, but man is often unaware of that interplay.

Man, however, deals with probabilities and with creativity in a unique fashion—a fashion that is made possible because of the far more dependable behavior of the other species.³

[...] I bid you a fond good evening.

The main issues with which the Sinful Self was concerned were focused most clearly in Mass Events and God of Jane, since more than the other books they represent a direct confrontation “attacking” the very legitimacy of the entire concept of sin and evil, insisting more dramatically on the good intent of man’s basic impulses. [...]

[...] The Sinful Self’s material is too long and complicated to describe here, except to say that it contains the Sinful Self’s own view of reality and its relationship to Jane’s background and work, it’s regrets, its defensive attitudes, its questions, and its genuine puzzlement that man has for so long —perhaps for most of history, indeed—persisted in the creation of and reliance upon such entities as the Sinful Self. [...]

[...] I told her, feeling that only good could come out of such a dialogue between parts of the overall self or personality. [...]

Then I bid you a fond, and to Ruburt a therapeutic good night. [...]

[...] If you have conflicts over the ideas connected with good and evil, or wealth and poverty, then the king might lose his lands or goods, or some catastrophe might befall him.

The black man is somewhere a white man or woman in your time. The white man or woman is somewhere black. [...]

[...] We can be a child at one end of it and an old man or woman at the other … Michelangelo [who lived for 89 years, from 1475 to 1564] decided to span a century himself instead of as three counterparts, say. Since there aren’t any laws about all of this, a great man could choose to do it that way in order to affect our world more with his gifts, from his own personal angles. [...]

Good evening.

[...] The psyche dwells in a reality so different from the world you usually recognize that there good and evil, as you think of them, are also seen to be as operationally or relatively true as the difference between the perceiver and the object perceived.

[...] “I didn’t feel that I was necessarily with it tonight,” Jane said, although her delivery had moved along well enough, and the material was good. [...]

[...] Men went to sleep to do their work, in other words, and the realm of dreams was considered more real than waking reality. [...]

[...] Good night.” [...]