“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.

(In Jane’s case, I mean something different by “relaxation” than might be expected. Just recently I quoted her in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality; from Note 6 for Appendix 19, in part:

(“It’s a sort of superrelaxation; almost profound, and mental and physical at once. A completely different thing than just yawning, even though I might be yawning. It involves a curious sense of dropping down inwardly, of going slowly beneath the realities we usually perceive…. Such a relaxation, then, is almost an extension of biological insight.”

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.

It is now nearing Easter (on March 26), and the yearly commemoration of what is considered historic fact: the [resurrection and] ascension of Christ into heaven.¹ Untold millions have in one way or another commemorated that occasion through the centuries. Private lives have merged with public sentiment and religious fervor. There have been numberless village festivals, or intimate family gatherings, and church services performed on Easter Sundays now forgotten. There have been bloody wars fought on the same account, and private persecutions in which those who did not agree with one or another’s religious dogmas were quite simply killed “for the good of their souls.”

(Intently:) Again, Christ was not crucified. The historical Christ,³ as he is thought of, was a man illuminated by psychic realities, touched with the infinite realization that any one given individual was, by virtue of his or her existence, a contact between All That Is and mankind.

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.

(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.

In each person the imaginative world, its force and power, merges into historical reality. In each person, the ultimate and unassailable and unquenchable power of All That Is is individualized, and dwells in time. Man’s imagination can carry him into those other realms — but when he tries to squeeze those truths into frameworks too small, he distorts and bends inner realities so that they become jagged dogmas.

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.

Give us a moment… You are a part of nature that has learned to make choices, a part of nature that naturally and automatically produces dreams and beliefs about which you then organize your reality. There are many effects which you do not like, but you possess a unique kind of consciousness, in which each individual has a hand in the overall formation of a world reality, and you are participating at a level of existence in which you are learning how to transform the imaginative realm of probabilities into a more or less specific, physically experienced world.

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.

And finally, here’s an answer to a number of inquiries from readers. The 647th session for Chapter 21 of Personal Reality was held on July 2, 1973, and in it I quoted a remark Seth made to me the following September: “You can have more material on Jerusalem or Christ now, or when you want it. You can have The Christ Book when you want it….”

4. Once again: See my material on evolution in Appendix 12 for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, when that book is published. In Mass Events, see Note 2 for Session 821.