“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Religion was hampered—and is—by its own interpretation of good and evil, but it did not deny the existence of other versions of consciousness, or differing kinds of psychological activity and life. (Long pause.) Reincarnation suggests, of course, the extension of personal existence beyond one time period, independently of one bodily form, the translation or transmission of intelligence through nonphysical frameworks, and implies psychological behavior, memory and desire as purposeful action without the substance of any physical mechanism—propositions that science at its present stage of development simply could not buy, and for which it could find no evidence, for its methods would automatically preclude the type of experience that such evidence would require.

4. Jane wrote the material I quoted in Note 3 some six weeks ago. In this spontaneous essay for her new journal she attempted to move beyond that thinking not only by searching through her own past, but by incorporating some of Seth’s latest ideas. Here are excerpts:

“We have to go beyond that—back to stressing the creative larger-than-life aspects. Otherwise all we have is a better problem-solving framework…. I’ve rejected all that kind of hash projected onto Seth’s books by others or myself—the assumptions that Seth must prove himself as a problem-solver—or the importance of functionalism over art. The larger view is that art, by being itself, is bigger than life while springing from it; that Seth’s and my books go beyond that simply by being themselves. They automatically put people in a different, vaster psychological space, another frame of reference, in which a good number of problems vanish or simply do not apply….

“Again as with master events, we’re dealing with a different framework of action entirely, where the Mona Lisa is ‘more real’ than the physical properties that compose it. This is not to deny the validity of its [materials]. But to discuss Seth and his ideas primarily from the true-or-false framework is the same thing as considering the Mona Lisa only from the validity of the physical properties of its paint and panel: very very limiting…. I don’t have to ‘live up’ to anything. I don’t have to ‘make the material work,’ or prove through my actions that it does, because it proves itself in the way that creativity does, by being beyond levels of true-false references. Otherwise I’m at cross-purposes with myself.”

“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. So excommunication was the punishment, or damnation … which meant more than mere ostracism, but the complete isolation of a person from those belief systems, with nothing between him or her and those frightening realities … without a framework in which to even organize meaning. This was what damnation really meant. To seek truth was the most dangerous of well-intentioned behavior, then … and retribution had to be swift and sure.