“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(A one-minute pause at 9:29.) Devils and demons have no objective existence. They have always represented, again, portions of mankind’s own psychological reality that to some extent he had not assimilated—but in a schizophrenic kind of expression, projected instead outward from himself. Therefore, it does not seem he must be held accountable for acts that he considers debasing, or cruel. He isolates himself from that responsibility by imagining the existence of other forces—the devils or demons of the nether world.

(9:35.) On an individual basis, the schizophrenic carries through those cultural patterns. The contrasts between, say, the superior self or the idealized self, and the debased self, may vary. They may be brilliantly apparent or somewhat blurred. In many such instances there will also be at least a short spurt of intense but scrambled, perhaps garbled, creative activity, in which the individual tries to recognize these various elements, as mankind himself has attempted many times in the creative, sometimes garbled creation of his own religions (with soft irony).

There were no schizophrenics in the time of the pagans, for the belief systems did not support that kind of interpretation. This does not mean that certain behavior did not occur that you would now call schizophrenic. It means that generally speaking such behavior fit within the psychological picture of reality. It [did so] because many of the behavior patterns associated, now, with schizophrenia, are “distorted and debased” remnants of behavior patterns that are part and parcel of man’s heritage, and that harken back to activities and abilities that at one time had precise social meaning, and served definite purposes.