“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane’s arms and legs have been sore today, off and on, but she feels that beneficial changes are taking place in them as a result of the sessions on the magical approach to reality. She’s “real pleased” with her progress on the poetry and essays for If We Live Again.

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.)

(Pause.) Communications between various scattered portions of the self often appear, again, in such situations as automatic writing, speaking, the hearing of voices, or through what the person believes to be telepathic messages from others.

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.

(9:19.) You have schizophrenic models, in other words, and the particular model chosen in any case, at any given time—for the models change—gives indications quite clearly of the person’s basic problems and dilemmas. Such cultural models are present in society to begin with, because in one way or another they express in an exaggerated form certain portions of man’s psychological reality that he does not as yet understand. This applies to the “good” schizophrenic models and to the “bad” ones—that is, to the gods as well as to the demons.

(Long pause at 9:25.) In the first place, reality is primarily a mental phenomenon, in which the perceptions of the senses are organized and put together in ways that perfectly “mimic” in physical terms a primary (long pause) nonphysical experience. This is tricky to express, because the application of a psychological awareness through the auspices of the flesh automatically makes certain transformations of data necessary.

(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.

Such people, however, in their fashion refuse to accept standardized versions of reality. Even though they are so uncertain of themselves that their psychological patterns do follow those of culture, religion, science, or whatever, they try to use those patterns in their own individual ways. They are actually in the process of putting their own personalities together long after most people have settled upon one official version or another—and so their behavior gives glimpses of the ever-changing give-and-take among the various elements of human personality.

Most of the declared instances of telepathy or clairvoyance that happen in schizophrenic situations are instead the individual’s attempts to prove to himself or herself that the idealized qualities of omnipotence or power are indeed within grasp—this, of course, to compensate for the basic feeling of powerlessness in more ordinary endeavors. In some situations, however, there are definite, quite valid instances of telepathy or clairvoyance, vivid out-of-body experiences, and other excursions beyond the officially accepted realm of reality.

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.

Jehovah and the Christian version of God brought about a direct conflict between the so-called forces of good and the so-called forces of evil by largely cutting out all of the intermediary gods, and therefore destroying the subtle psychological give-and-take that occurred between them—among them—and polarizing man’s own view of his inner psychological reality.

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.

(10:14.) These include man’s ability to identify with the forces of nature, to project portions of his own psychological reality outward from himself, and then to perceive those portions in a revitalized transformation—a transformation that then indeed can alter physical reality.

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.

You make your own reality, Man’s “evil” exists because of his misunderstanding of his own ideals, because of the gap that seems to exist between the ideal and its actualization. Evil actions, in other words, are the result of ignorance and misunderstanding. Evil is not a force in itself.