“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“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.

“In medieval times, to be excommunicated was no trivial incident, but an event harkening severance that touched both the soul and the body, and all political, religious and economic conditions by which the two were tied together.

“Many people were dependent upon the church for their well-being, and in reincarnational terms many millions of people alive today were familiar then with such conditions. The nunneries and monasteries were long-term social and religious institutions, some extremely rigorous, while others were religiously oriented in name only. But there is a long history of the conflicts between creative thought, heresy, excommunication—or worse, death. All of those factors were involved in one way or another in the fabric of Ruburt’s nightmare material.