“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(10:05.) As I said, there are all ranges of suffering, and I am beginning this discussion, which I will continue now and then in between regular book dictation, in a very general manner. In times past in particular, though the custom is not dead, men purged themselves, wore ashes and beat themselves with chains, or went hungry or otherwise deprived themselves. They suffered, in other words, for religion’s sake. It was not just that they believed suffering was good for the soul—a statement which can or cannot be true, incidentally, and I will go into that later—but they understood something else: The body will only take so much suffering when it releases consciousness. So they hoped to achieve religious ecstasy.

Jane added that her group of playmates hadn’t engaged in the same sort of games that mine had. “We might have played dead now and then—you know, lain down and closed our eyes, but that would be all.” In fifth-grade history class, in the convent she’d been sent to because her mother was hospitalized for treatment of severe rheumatoid arthritis, Jane learned about Marie Antoinette, queen of France, who had been guillotined in Paris in 1793. “I used to play being her all by myself,” she said. “I’d be brave and scornful, knowing I was going to be beheaded—that sort of thing.”