“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the culture that you know, such information remains hidden from you. Your main belief systems lead you to feel that your present life is singular, unsupported by any knowledge of prior experience with existence, and fated to be cut off or dead-ended without a future. Instead, you always carry the inner knowledge of innumerable available futures (emphatically). Your emotional life at certain levels is enriched by the unconscious realization that those who love you from past or future are connected to you by special ties that add to your emotional heritage and support.

As many have supposed, particularly in fiction, love relationships do indeed survive time, and they put you in a special correspondence. Even if you were aware of reincarnational existences, your present psychological behavior would not be threatened but retain its prominence—for only within certain space and time intersections can physical actions occur. The more or less general acceptance of the theory of reincarnation, however, would automatically alter your social systems, add to the richness of experience, and in particular insert a fresh feeling for the future, so that you did not feel your lives dead-ended.

“But you’re doing great, hon,” I told Jane after I’d read her journal entry. I was glad to reassure her, for I believed what I said. If she has hassles, I added, they’re quite understandable: Not only is she offering our world creative new ways by which to understand reality, but in her uncertainty about what she’s doing, she feels that she must prove her ideas to the world all by herself—something that few people have to do in such an all-encompassing manner. At the same time she has to protect herself, for both of us are caught in the uneasy notion that every time Jane gets too close to any sort of basic truth, she automatically threatens many of the deeply entrenched, rigid belief systems people have built up in our reality. Obviously Jane thinks her contemporaries often reject her—and sometimes I also think they do. Consciousness exploring itself once again, I said, more than a little ironically….

“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.

“Ruburt found great comfort in the church as a young person, for if it created within its members the image of a sinful self, it also of course provided a steady system of treatment—a series of rituals that gave the individual some sense of hope the sinful self could be redeemed, as in the framework of most of Christianity, through adherence to certain segments of Christian dogma.

“Now Ruburt had only one parent available most of the time, and he did not feel secure in that relationship—a situation chosen ahead of time, now. There is great leeway in the nature of such bondings…. With some people, they are so secure that they provide an overall, fairly permanent inner and outer framework. Ruburt’s relationship with his mother left much to be desired. The bonding did not secure him that vital sense of safety, and he felt threatened by abandonment. His bonding to the cultural beliefs of religion was very strong to make up for that initial lack. The sinful-self material represents those ideas that were a strong element in his original belief structures. The ‘troublesome’ material remained relatively inactive until his curiosity and ability led him to actively challenge those ideas while [he was] also in a situation where the natural fear of abandonment might be suggested. At certain points, the assimilation of new information is so qualifiedly different from the original belief structure that in order to assimilate it the personality is left for a time between belief systems.

“The point at which such a situation happens is of course internal, and it may or may not have anything to do with the quality of material, but with its nature. Each society—or each system of knowledge, for that matter—has its own taboos built in, and most of these imply abandonment by the community. A firm bonding with the parent ideally implies, however, that the child will not be abandoned, despite parental anger at any given time.