“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You do not understand this point clearly at all, but your social organizations, your governments — these are based upon imaginative principles. The basis of your most intimate experience, the framework behind all of your organized structures, rests upon a reality that is not considered valid by the very institutions that are formed through its auspices.

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.

Unfortunately, the fundamentalists accept literal interpretations of intuitive realities in such a way that they further narrow the channels through which their psychic abilities can flow. The fundamental framework, in this period of time, for all of its fervor, is not rich — as for example Christianity was in the past, with its numerous saints. It is instead a fanatical Puritan vein, peculiarly American in character, and restrictive rather than expansive, for the bursts of emotion are highly structured — that is, the emotions are limited in most areas of life, permitted only an explosive religious expression under certain conditions, when they are not so much spontaneously expressed as suddenly released from the dam of usual repression.

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.