“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: Now: You may be quite able to see through the distortions of conventional Christianity. You may have changed your ideas to such an extent that you can see little similarity between your current ones and those of the past. Now you may believe in the theories of Buddhism, for example, or of another Eastern philosophy.

The differences between any of those systems of thought and Christianity may be so apparent that the similarities escape you. You may follow one of the schools of Buddhism in which great stress is laid upon the denial of the body, discipline of the flesh, and the avoidance of desire. These elements are quite characteristic of Christianity also, of course, but they may appear more palatable, exotic, or reasonable coming from a source foreign to your childhood education. So you may leap from one to the other, shouting emancipation and feeling yourself quite free of old limiting ideas.

[...] So, instead, we will form a free city to which those travelers can come, and where those who enter can read books about Buddhism if they prefer, or play at being Catholic. [...]

3. In Buddhism, nirvana — a state of heavenly perfection — is achieved by the extinction of individual life and the soul’s absorption into the supreme spirit.

(Today we read a long treatise on the “truths” advocated by “holy men” associated with various Eastern religious philosophies — Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and so forth. [...]

[...] I may say that Buddhism does indeed come closer in essence to reality than other religions. [...]

[...] The fact remains that millions of human beings who follow and practice Buddhism are told, as many religions tell their followers, “Better worlds are to come, so ignore this agony, and this hunger, and this pain, and the murder in the streets. [...]

3. In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma is thought of as the total moral sum of an individual’s acts in any one life — thus determining the person’s fate or destiny in the next. [...]

[...] This is the title given to Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. [...]

[...] If you move from sinner to saint or saint to sinner, from Buddhism to fundamentalism of the Christian kind, or from one sect to another, seemingly with a diverse belief system, your growth and transformations are still being provided for by a religious structure.

[...] Jane and I know that such correlations exist — indeed, we’d only be surprised if they didn’t. Others have often mentioned them to us, and we’ve done a little reading on Buddhism, Hinduism, Zen, and Taoism, for example, not to mention subjects like shamanism, voodooism, and obeah. [...]

[...] (A simile I often think of here compares Eastern and Western life and thought with the right and left hemispheres of the brain; they’re separate, yet united; each half performs functions that complement and to some extent overlap those of the other, and together they operate as a whole.) But we dislike the idea of nirvana in Buddhism and Hinduism, which calls for the extinction or blowing out of individual consciousness, and its absorption into a supreme spirit, usually after a series of lives. [...]

([Ron.:] “That doesn’t contradict Buddhism or Hinduism, if you say that God is All That Is and is all personalities...”)

[...] Buddhism and Hinduism would banish the very thought: How dare one even think of escaping, or just simply ignoring, his or her “fate or destiny” (to put it loosely)! [...]