PROBABILITIES, THE NATURE OF GOOD AND
EVIL, AND RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM

The chapter heading: “Probabilities, the Nature of Good and Evil, and Religious Symbolism.”

Instead, the soul stands at the center of itself, exploring, extending its capacities in all directions at once, involved in issues of creativity, each one highly legitimate. The probable system of reality opens up the nature of the soul to you. It should change current religion’s ideas considerably. For this reason, the nature of good and evil is a highly important point.

Now those who have such beliefs actually lack a necessary deep trust in the nature of consciousness, of the soul, and of All That Is. They concentrate upon not what they think of as the power of good, but fearfully upon what they think of as the power of evil.

Some very old religions understood the hallucinatory nature of the devil concept, but even in Egyptian times, the simpler and more distorted ideas became prevalent, particularly with the masses of people. In some ways, men in those times could not understand the concept of a god without the concept of a devil.

Storms, for example, are highly creative natural events, though they can also cause destruction. Early man could see only the destruction. Some intuitively understood that any effects are creative, despite their appearances, but few could convince their fellow men.

(10:21.) In any of these worlds, the Christ drama could never appear as it appeared within your own. Now the same thing applies to each of your great religions, though as I have said in the past, the Buddhists come closer, generally speaking, to a description of the nature of reality. They have not understood the eternal validity of the soul, however, in terms of its exquisite invulnerability, nor been able to hold a feeling for its unique character. But Buddha, like Christ, interpreted what he almost knew in terms of your own reality. Not only of your own physical reality, but your own probable physical reality.

(“Well, naturally I’d like to see it sometime.”)

(10:41.) Various bands of the Speakers continued through the centuries. Because they were trained so well, the messages retained their authenticity. They believed, however, that it was wrong to set words into written form, and so did not record them. They also used natural earth symbols, but clearly understood the reasons for this. The Speakers, singly, existed in your Stone Age period, and were leaders. Their abilities helped the cavemen survive. There was little physical communication, however, in those days between the various Speakers, and some were unaware of the existence of the others.

Since consciousness forms matter, and not the other way around, then thought exists before the brain and after it. A child can think coherently before he learns vocabulary — but he cannot impress the physical universe in its terms. So this inner knowledge has always been available, but is to become physically manifest — literally made flesh. The Speakers were the first to impress this inner knowledge upon the physical system, to make it physically known. Sometimes only one or two Speakers were alive in several centuries. Sometimes there were many. They looked around them and knew that the world sprang from their interior reality. They told others. They knew (pause) that the seemingly solid natural objects about them were composed of many minute consciousnesses.

They realized that from their own creativity they formed idea into matter, and that the stuff of matter was itself conscious and alive. They were intimately familiar with the natural rapport existing between themselves and their environment, therefore, and knew that they could alter their environment through their own acts.