“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last Monday evening Seth gave a very short private session for Jane; it turned out to consist of just one page of double-spaced typewritten information. During the session Seth said that he was “preparing some special material for Ruburt,” but except for the excellent relaxation effects Jane has experienced since then, we have yet to learn what else may be involved.

Again, man directs his existence through the use of his imagination — a feat that does distinguish him from the animals. What connects people and separates them is the power of idea and the force of imagination. Patriotism, family loyalty, political affiliations — the ideas behind these have the greatest practical applications in your world. You project yourselves into time like children through freely imagining your growth. You instantly color physical experience and nature itself with the tints of your unique imaginative processes. Unless you think quite consistently — and deeply — the importance of the imagination quite escapes you, and yet it literally forms the world that you experience and the mass world in which you live.

(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 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.”