“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

And yet, Seth told us, in spite of everything Jane’s sinful self could begin to change once it was reached. We had reached it to some degree, and more than once, but the emotional upsets involved had left Jane feeling worse during this time. Her sinful self, according to Seth, no longer identifies with the Church. That self itself has become frightened, in conflict within itself over its early training and Jane’s great creativity, which it regards as wrong: The creative self is guilty. Jane had panic attacks while sleeping.

People can become quite frightened, then, of any kind of experiences of a personal nature that imply reincarnational life, for they are then faced with the taboos of science, or perhaps by the distorted explanations of some religions or cults. You therefore protect yourselves from many quite natural upthrusts that would on their own give you experience with your own reincarnational existences, and you are often denied psychological comfort in times of stress that you might otherwise receive.

“Part of me doesn’t want to contend with this material at all,” Jane wrote for her journal, “but last night I had one of the strangest, quite frightening experiences—all the odder because there are so few real events to hang on to. Very early after we went to bed I realized I was in the middle of a nightmarish experience, one terribly vivid emotionally yet with no real story line. I only know that the following were involved: a childhood nursery tale and a toy like the cuddly cat doll I had as a child, named Susie, and thought the world of. Anyway, the point is that the story … and there I lose it; I don’t get the connections. All I know is that I awakened myself crying, my body very sore, sat on the side of the bed and made the following connections from my feelings at the time.

“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.

“The book was based on the idea that nature was against man; and that religion was man’s attempt to operate within that unsafe context. The feelings I was getting went even further, that religion or science or whatever weren’t attempts to discover truth—but to escape from doing so, to substitute some satisfying tale or story instead. And I suppose that if someone persisted long enough, he or she would find the holes in the stories … and undo the whole works. The idea of the stories was to save each man from having to encounter reality in such a frightening fashion…. The characters in the stories did this for him in their own fashion, and if you kept [searching] … you threatened the fine framework of organization that alone made life possible….”