“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

All of those religious and political structures that you certainly recognize as valid, arising from the “event” of Christ’s ascension, existed — and do exist — because of an idea. The idea was the result of a spectacular act of the imagination that then leapt upon the historical landscape, highlighting all of the events of the time, so that they became illuminated indeed with a blessed and unearthly light.

The theory of evolution,⁴ for instance, is an imaginative construct, and yet through its lights some generations now have viewed their world. It is not only that you think of yourselves differently, but you actually experience a different kind of self. Your institutions change their aspects accordingly, so that experience fits the beliefs that you have about it. You act in certain ways. You view the entire universe in a fashion that did not exist before, so that imagination and belief intangibly structure your subjective experience and your objective circumstances.

(10:10.) In all of the other imaginative constructs, for example, whatever their merits and disadvantages, man felt himself to be a part of a plan. The planner might be God, or nature itself, or man within nature or nature within man. There might be many gods or one, but there was a meaning in the universe. Even the idea of fate gave man something to act against, and roused him to action.

(All with much emphasis and irony:) The idea of a meaningless universe, however, is in itself a highly creative imaginative act. Animals, for example, could not imagine such an idiocy, so that the theory shows the incredible accomplishment of an obviously ordered mind and intellect that can imagine itself to be the result of nonorder, or chaos — [you have] a creature who is capable of “mapping” its own brain, imagining that the brain’s fantastic regulated order could emerge from a reality that itself has no meaning. Indeed, then, the theory actually says that the ordered universe magically emerged — and evolutionists must certainly believe in a God of Chance somewhere, or in Coincidence with a capital C, for their theories would make no sense at all otherwise.

The [fundamentalists] returned to an authoritarian religion in which the slightest act must be regulated. They gave release, and they are giving release, to the emotions, and are thus rebelling against scientific intellectualism. They will see the world in black-and-white terms again, with good and evil clearly delineated in the most simplistic terms, and thus escape a slippery, thematic universe, in which man’s feelings seemed to give him no foothold at all.

If you look for signs of God’s vengeance you will find them everywhere. An avalanche or a flood or an earthquake will not be seen as a natural act of the earth’s natural creativity, but instead as a punishment from God for sin.

(11:01.) It seems almost a sacrilege to say that man is good, when everywhere you meet contradictions, for too often man certainly appears to act as if his motives were instead those of a born killer. You have been taught not to trust the very fabric of your being. You cannot expect yourselves to act rationally or altruistically in any consistent manner if you believe that you are automatically degraded, or that your nature is so flawed that such performance is uncharacteristic.

In a way you choose from an infinite, endless, uncomputable number of ideas, and sculpt these into the physical fragments that compose normal experience. You do this in such a way that the timeless events are experienced in time, and so that they mix and merge to conform to the dimensions of your reality. Along the way there are accomplishments that are as precious as any creatures of any kind could produce. There are also great failures — but these are failures only in comparison with the glittering inner knowledge of the imagination that holds for you those ideals against which you judge your acts.

1. I added “[resurrection and]” to Seth’s passage because Jane told me that according to ordinary teaching Christ’s resurrection from the dead took place on Easter Sunday, the third day following his crucifixion (on Friday), while his ascension into heaven transpired at an indefinite later time — up to 40 days later, as stated in the writings of St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles (AA 1:10). As far as we know, Seth’s inference that Christ’s resurrection and ascension took place on the same day is contrary to popular belief.

At the same time, Jane and I checked a number of biblical references on the New Testament — and discovered that Seth’s passage seems to be a case where he shows a knowledge we don’t consciously possess. For we learned that of the four Gospels (according to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, in that order), some scholars believe that Luke and John can be read as stating that Christ’s resurrection and ascension took place on the same day. Yet in Acts, Luke postulates the 40-day interval between the two events. (Originally Luke composed his Gospel and Acts as one treatise; the two were separated early in the second century.) Out of such contradictions as those implied in Luke’s case, however, confusion and opposing opinions reign when one studies the Gospels and related material. Christ himself left no written records, nor are there any eyewitness or contemporary accounts of his life.

In the 591st session for Seth Speaks, I noted claims for an earlier date for the origin of the first Gospel, that according to Mark; nevertheless, most authorities still believe that the Gospels were written between A.D. 65 and 110. Since Christ was presumably crucified around A.D. 30, this means that some 35–40 years passed before the advent of Mark’s account. There are many consistencies in the Gospels, but also inconsistencies that cannot be resolved. Even the authorships of the Gospels according to Matthew and John are now being questioned. A study of the New Testament books alone can quickly lead one into a maze of questions: Why isn’t the resurrection itself described? Why are there so few references to the ascension? Matthew doesn’t mention it at all in his Gospel, for example; and Paul alludes to it only once (1 Timothy 3:16) in his writings. Is the Gospel according to Luke merely schematic, rather than chronological? If time (as much as 40 days) did elapse between Christ’s resurrection and ascension, where was he physically during all of that period, other than on the few occasions cited in the Gospels and in Acts, when on various occasions he revealed himself to the women who discovered his empty tomb, to the apostles, and to some others? Sometimes Christ appeared as an apparition — but as Seth commented in a private session: “You could not have a world in which the newly risen dead mixed with the living. An existence in a spiritual realm had to follow such a resurrection.”