“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

3. Jane’s mention of possession came about because today I’d read her an article in a scholarly journal we subscribe to. The piece contained public information with which we were already familiar. 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. This contradiction was reinforced in 1972, when Pope Paul VI declared before several thousand people that the devil is a distinct, actual being.)

The supposedly telepathic messages can be attributed to contemporaries—enemies, gods, devils, or what have you. Spacemen are a recent addition. In most cases, what you have here are expressions of strong portions of the self that are more or less purposefully kept in isolation. They may appear or disappear, psychologically speaking. They present a kind of chain of command—one that is not usually permanent for any long period, however.

(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.

The Christ figure represents the exaggerated, idealized version of the inner self that the individual feels incapable of living up to. He feels he is being crucified by his own abilities. He may—or of course she may—on other occasions receive messages from the devil, or demons, which on their part represent the person’s feelings about the physical self that seems to be so evil and contradictory in contrast to the idealistic image. Again, there is great variety of behavior here.

In your terms of time, man has always projected unassimilated psychological elements of his own personality outward, but in much earlier times he did this using a multitudinous variety of images, personifications, gods, goddesses, demons and devils, good spirits and bad. Before the Roman gods were fully formalized, there was a spectacular range of good and bad deities, with all gradations [among them], that more or less “democratically” represented the unknown but sensed, splendid and tumultuous characteristics of the human soul, and have stood for those sensed but unknown glimpses of his own reality that man was in one way or another determined to explore.

The next natural step would be to reassimilate those portions of the self, to acknowledge their ancient origins and abilities, to return them so that they form a new coating, as it were, or a new version of selfhood. It is as if (pause) man could not understand his own potentials unless he projected them outward into a godhead, where he could see them in a kind of isolated pure form, recognize them for what they are, and then accept them—the potentials—as a part of his own psychological reality (all very intently). As a species, however, you have not taken the last step. Your idea of the devil represents the same kind of process, except that it stands for your idea of evil or darkness, or abilities that you are afraid of. They also stand for elements of your own potential. I am not speaking of evil possibilities, but that man must realize that he is responsible for his acts, whether they are called good or evil.