“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“We did stop at a church on a hill with a cross on top of the church.”)

[...] When I saw through the conventions and dogmas of the church, I threw the whole idea overboard. [...]

As he progressed with the series, Seth delved into Jane’s sinful self from a number of viewpoints: its birth and growth during her intense relationship with the Roman Catholic Church throughout her early years; the development of her very stubborn core beliefs; her creative dilemmas after she left the church in her late teens; the conflicts she began to experience after our marriage, involving on the one hand her sinful self and the religion she thought she’d left behind, and on the other hand science, art, writing, and the unconventional direction she discovered her natural, mystical abilities were taking via the Seth material; her growing fears of leading others astray; and the very real necessity for her—and for each individual—to achieve value fulfillment.

[...] In a large regard the church through the centuries ruled through the use of fear far more than the use of love. [...] The political nature of inspirational material of any kind was well understood by the church. [...]

[...] Her sinful self, according to Seth, no longer identifies with the Church. [...]

“They were these: that the entire world with its organization was kept together by certain stories, like those of the Roman Catholic Church; that it was dangerous beyond all knowing to look through the stories or examine them for the truth, and that all kinds of taboos existed to keep us from doing this, since … on the other side, so to speak, there was an incomprehensible frightening chaotic dimension, malevolent; powers beyond our imagining; and that to question the stories was to threaten not just personal survival but the fabric of reality as we know it. [...]

[...] Joe A may be an excellent husband, bread-winner, and father, a church-goer who believes in the beauty and goodness of sex. [...]

On topside Joe A may go to church frequently, be kind and considerate to his family, and, say, come home from work every night for supper. [...]

[...] As a child, couched in the Catholic Church, his poetry was a method of natural expression, a creative art, and also the vehicle through which he examined himself, the world as he knew it, and the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church.

His creative abilities led him beyond the precepts of that church, creatively speaking, at a fairly early age—though the actual breaking-off point did not occur in fact until he was in his teens. [...]

[...] He had something to do with being the sexton of a church. It was a small church, not Catholic. It was a Church of England. [...]

They were these; that the entire world and its organization was kept together by certain stories or one in particular—like the Catholic Church’s; that it was dangerous beyond all knowing to look through the stories or examine them or to look for the truth and that all kinds of taboos existed to keep us from doing this, since.... [...]

People who wrote books against the Catholic Church were excommunicated. [...] There was a conflict between creative work and the church even when only poetry was involved. [...]

[...] The poetry went against the church, but here the overconscientious self was able to realize the church’s limitations and went along.

[...] He has had difficulties on Fridays because he eats meat on Fridays, and difficulties Sunday because he does not go to church.

[...] I did not go for the military, and so there was nothing to do but go to the Church. [...]

[...] I wrote two Church laws. [...]

[...] Briefly, most authorities in the Roman Catholic Church realize that almost all of those who are supposed to be “possessed” by malevolent forces are in actuality mentally ill people who need treatment. Yet the church must admit the separate reality of the devil and numerous demons, because their existences are given in the Gospels. [...]

[...] “It’s about my dream last Sunday morning, when I was climbing the church steeple that reached way above me into the sky. [...]

The church symbolism was also obvious, but the situation itself exists in an intellectual framework. [...]

One of the church’s most powerful allies was to that extent its understanding of human psychology, for if you left the church or its system, it knew that you still carried many of its beliefs nevertheless—only now you had something like an itch that you could not scratch. [...]

(“How about Jane’s speaking to the Unitarian Church later this month?”)

[...] He did not leave the church, literally, until long after he had left it spiritually. [...]

[...] A Saint Cecelia Church here. [...]

[...] He was on a journey from England to Boston, and stopped briefly at a Boston church where Joseph was then a minister. [...]

[...] That faith existed even before churchly doctrine was imposed over it. [...]

(“An entrance,” Linda, a Protestant, married a Catholic in a Brooklyn church. [...] My brother Loren told us Sunday that this decision is so recent that his daughter was the first to be married in such a fashion in this church.

[...] The “initiation” referred to the marriage of course, but also to the beginning of a new tradition in the particular church where for the first time a Protestant was allowed into the altar section.

[...] Most churches preach a dogma that stresses concepts of the sinful self, and sees man as a creature contaminated by original sin even before birth.

[...] The church had three bells. [...] You died at 63 and were buried in the church courtyard.

There was a church of brick, in a neighborhood at first pleasant and then deteriorating. [...]

(Pause at 9:30.) At no time will any given church be able to express the inner experience of all individuals. At no time will any church find itself in a position in which it can effectively curtail the inner experience of its members — it will only seem to do so. [...]