“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Only a portion of your entire identity is “presently” familiar to you, as you know. Therefore, when you consider the question of a supreme being, you imagine a male personality with those abilities that you yourselves possess, with great emphasis upon qualities you admire. This imagined god has therefore changed throughout your centuries, mirroring man’s shifting ideas of himself.

God was seen as cruel and powerful when man believed that these were desirable characteristics, needed particularly in his battle for physical survival. He projected these upon his idea of a god because he envied them and feared them. You have cast your idea of god, therefore, in your own image.

In a reality that is inconceivably multidimensional, the old concepts of God are relatively meaningless. Even the term, a supreme being, is in itself distortive, for you naturally project the qualities of human nature upon it. If I told you that God was an idea, you would not understand what I meant, for you do not understand the dimensions in which an idea has its reality, or the energy that it can originate and propel. You do not believe in ideas in the same way that you believe in physical objects, so if I tell you that God is an idea, you will misinterpret this to mean that God is less than real — nebulous, without reality, without purpose, and without motive action.

Now your own physical image is the materialization of your idea of yourself within the properties of matter. Without the idea of yourself, your physical image would not be; yet often it is all you are aware of. The initial power and energy of that idea of yourself keeps your image alive. Ideas, then, are far more important than you realize. If you will try to accept the idea that your own existence is multidimensional, that you dwell within the medium of infinite probabilities, then you may catch a slight glimpse of the reality that is behind the word “god,” and you may understand why it is almost impossible to capture a true understanding of that concept in words.

God, therefore, is first of all a creator, not of one physical universe but of an infinite variety of probable existences, far more vast than those aspects of the physical universe with which your scientists are familiar. He did not simply then send a son to live and die on one small planet. He is a part of all probabilities.

This awareness gives personal experience with the multidimensional richness that exists not apart from but intermingled with, within, through, and all about your physical world of sense. To say that physical life is not real is to deny that reality pervades all appearance, and is a part of all appearance. In the same manner, God does not exist apart from or separate from physical reality, but exists within it and as a part of it, as he exists within and as a part of all other systems of existence.

(9:46.) Your Christ figure represents, symbolically, your idea of God and his relationships. There were three separate individuals whose history blended, and they became known collectively as Christ — hence many discrepancies in your records. These were all males because at that time of your development, you would not have accepted a female counterpart.

These individuals were a part of one entity. You could not but imagine God as a father. It would never have occurred to you to imagine a god in any other than human terms. Earth components. These three figures worked out a drama, highly symbolic, propelled by concentrated energy of great force.

(10:12.) The same kinds of dramas in different ways have been given, and while the drama is always different, it is always the same. This does not mean that a Christ has appeared within each system of reality. It means that the idea of God has manifested within each system in a way that is comprehensible to the inhabitants.

This drama continues to exist. It does not belong, for example, to your past. Only you have placed it there. This does not mean that it always reoccurs. The drama, then, was far from meaningless, and the spirit of Christ, in your terms, is legitimate. It is the probable God-drama that you choose to perceive. There were others that were perceived, but not by you, and there are other such dramas existing now.

(Pause at 10:41.) Other religions were based upon different dramas, in which ideas were acted out in a way that was comprehensible to various cultures. Unfortunately, the differences between the dramas often led to misunderstandings, and these were used as excuses for wars. These dramas are also privately worked out in the dream state. The God-personified figures first were introduced to man in the dream state, and the way then prepared.

Now: God is more than the sum of all the probable systems of reality he has created, and yet he is within each one of these, without exception. He is therefore within each man and woman. He is also within each spider, shadow, and frog, and this is what man does not like to admit.

God can only be experienced, and you experience him whether or not you realize it, through your own existence. He is not male or female, however, and I use the terms only for convenience’s sake. In the most inescapable truth, he is not human in your terms at all, nor in your terms is he a personality. Your ideas of personality are too limited to contain the multitudinous facets of his multidimensional existence.