“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:49.) Because man has not understood the characteristics of the world of imagination, he has thus far always insisted upon turning his myths into historical fact, for he considers the factual world alone as the real one. A man, literally of flesh and blood, must then prove beyond all doubt that each and every other [human being] survives death — by dying, of course, and then by rising, physically-perceived, into heaven. Each man does survive death, and each woman (with quiet amusement), but only such a literal-minded species would insist upon the physical death of a god-man as “proof of the pudding.”

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.

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.

The world of the imagination is indeed your contact with your own source. Its characteristics are the closest to those in Framework 2 that you can presently encounter.

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 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.

Now: The latest growth of fundamentalist religion has arisen as a countermeasure against the theories of evolution. You have, then, an overcompensation, for in the Darwinian⁵ world there was no meaning and no laws. There were no standards of right or wrong, so that large portions of the people felt rootless.

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.

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 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.”