“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Good evening.

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

Regardless, there are certain tendencies, mental stances, that you will take about yourself, your body and your life to one degree or another. Many of these will be directly or indirectly connected with old myths and beliefs of your forefathers. Your ideas of good and evil as applied to health and illness are highly important, for instance. (Pause.) Few can escape putting value judgments in such areas. If you consider illness as a kind of moral stigma, then you will simply add an unneeded quality to any condition of ill health.

Such judgments are very simplistic, and ignore the great range of human motivation and experience. If you are bound and determined that “GOD” (in capitals and quotes) creates only “good,” then any physical deficiency, illness or deformity becomes an affront to your belief, threatens it, and makes you angry and resentful. If you become ill you can hate yourself for not being what you think you should be — a perfect physical image made in the likeness of a perfect God.

(9:55.) Following such a belief, you will confuse suffering with saintliness, desolation with purity, and the denial of the body as spirituality and a badge of holiness. Under such conditions you can even seek out illness to prove to yourself the strength of your own spirituality — and to impress it upon others. The same kind of moral value judgment can be placed in almost any area of human activity, and will of course have social repercussions. Those reactions will add to the prevailing beliefs and in turn affect the individual.

You may believe that wealth is a result of a moral virtue, and comes from “God’s” direct benevolence. As a result, poverty becomes evidence of a lack of morality. “God” made so many people poor that obviously no man should dare try to change the situation — that rationale is often used. The poor, then, following these beliefs, are looked down upon as are the diseased.

Now: Such critical evaluations are placed upon colors as well. Often white is considered pure, and black impure, white good and black evil.

This is not the place for me to go into a long discussion concerning the significance of races, yet each one is highly meaningful, and represents a different aspect of humanity as a whole. Therefore, each race has a symbolic meaning to mankind’s psyche. The outside experience and structure of any given race’s experience may change, but the inner symbolism will still remain, and be creatively grappled with.

Your daily experience will be affected by your race, your beliefs about it, your beliefs about other races, and the climate of opinion in general. On a quite simple basis, if you consider God in human terms you will project him as belonging to your own race. If you belong to a minority or if you are black, then you may be caught in a conflict of beliefs.