“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the next chapter, let us consider more closely your ideas about good and evil, the morality of the self, and examine the ways in which your ideas are reflected in your lives.

Birth and death then have their function, intensifying and focusing your attention. Life seems more dear in your terms, corporeal terms, because of the existence of death. It seems, perhaps, easier to have no conscious idea of the year or time that death might occur. Unconsciously of course each man and woman knows, and yet hides the knowledge.

Thus far I have rather frequently mentioned the state of grace (in the 636th session in Chapter Nine, for instance), because while it has many dimensions it is, practically speaking, the cause of your sense of well-being and accomplishment. It is a condition of your existence. Each of you may put the following in your own terms, but often it may seem as if your conscience tells you that you have “fallen out of grace,” and that some inner, mysterious, joyous sense of support no longer sustains you. Unfortunately, conscience as you think of it is an untrustworthy guide, speaking to you through the mouths of mothers and fathers, teachers and clergy — all perhaps from distant years, and each of whom had their own ideas of what was right and wrong for you and for humanity at large.

You accepted the concepts for your own reasons. Those given beliefs represent the spiritual and mental fabric of ideas — the raw material, so to speak, with which you have to work. In adolescence certain beliefs will be easily and immediately abandoned, or altered to fit the expanding pattern of experience. Still other beliefs will remain, with perhaps certain elements being changed. The beliefs may be revised to fit your new image, for example, while the main pattern remains the same.

Let us consider the idea of original sin, all of the colorful forms it may take within your body of concepts, and the ways in which these will affect your behavior and experience.

If certain foods are good then other foods must be bad. If he had a symptom after eating specific items, then he avoided those. Before he read the book the idea would not have occurred to him in that context.