“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There have been spiritual rebirths and regenerations — and ungodly slaughter as well, as a result of the meaning of Easter. Blood and flesh have certainly been touched, then, and lives changed in that regard.

Christ saw that in each person divinity and humanity met — and that man survived death by virtue of his existence within the divine. Without exception, all of the horrors connected with Christianity’s name came from “following the letter rather than the spirit of the law,” or by insistence upon literal interpretations — while the spiritual, imaginative concepts beneath were ignored.

Your experience of history, of the days of your life, is invisibly formed by those ideas that exist in the imagination only, and then are projected upon the physical world. This applies to your individual beliefs about yourself and the way you see yourself in your imagination. You are having wars between the Jews and the Arabs and the Christians once again, because emphasis is put upon literal interpretations of spiritual truths.

In evolution man’s nature is amoral, and anything goes for survival’s sake. There is no possibility of any spiritual survival as far as most evolutionists are concerned. The fundamentalists would rather believe in man’s inherent sinful nature, for at least their belief system provides for a framework in which he can be saved. Christ’s message was that each man is good inherently, and is an individualized portion of the divine — and yet a civilization based upon that precept has never been attempted. The vast social structures of Christianity were instead based upon man’s “sinful” nature — not the organizations and structures that might allow him to become good, or to obtain the goodness that Christ quite clearly perceived man already possessed.

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.”