“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Such religious dramas focus, direct, and, hopefully, clarify aspects of inner reality that need to be physically represented. (Long pause, eyes closed.) These do not only appear within your own system. Many are also projected into other systems of reality. Religion per se, however, is always the external facade of inner reality. The primary spiritual existence alone gives meaning to the physical one. In the most real terms, religion should include all of the pursuits of man in his search for the nature of meaning and truth. Spirituality cannot be some isolated, specialized activity or characteristic.

Exterior religious dramas are important and valuable only to the extent that they faithfully reflect the nature of inner, private spiritual existence. To the extent that a man feels that his religion expresses such inner experience, he will feel it valid. Most religions per se, however, set up as permissible certain groups of experiences while denying others. They limit themselves by applying the principles of the sacredness of life only to your own species, and often to highly limited groups within it.

The early Hebrew god became a symbol of man’s unleashed ego. God behaved exactly as an enraged child would, had he those powers, sending thunder and lightning and fire against his enemies, destroying them. Man’s emerging ego therefore brought forth emotional and psychological problems and challenges. The sense of separation from nature grew. Nature became a tool to use against others.

Sometime before the emergence of the Hebrew god these tendencies were apparent. In many ancient, now-forgotten tribal religions, recourse was also made to the gods to turn nature against the enemy. Before this time, however, man felt a part of nature, not separated from it. It was regarded as an extension of his being, as he felt an extension of its reality. One cannot use oneself as a weapon against oneself in those terms. (Pause.)

Man desired in one way to step out of himself, out of the framework in which he had his psychological existence, to try new challenges, to step out of a mode of consciousness into another. He wanted to study the process of his own consciousness. In one way this meant a giant separation from the inner spontaneity that had given him both peace and security. On the other hand, it offered a new creativity, in his terms.

Man tried to form a new realm, attain a different kind of focus and awareness. His consciousness turned a corner outside of itself. To do this he concentrated less and less upon inner reality, and therefore began the process of inner reality only as it was projected outward into the physical world.

(10:45.) Behind all faces there is one face, yet this does not mean that each man’s face is not his own. The further religious drama of which I have spoken, in your terms still to come, represents another stage in both the internal and external dramas in which the emergent ego becomes aware of much of its heritage. While maintaining its own status, it will be able to have much greater commerce with other portions of the self, and also to offer to the inner self opportunities of awareness that the inner self on its own could not procure.

Now: Such an alliance sets up certain fields of attraction. A man who attaches himself to one of the gods is necessarily attaching himself largely to his own projections. Some, in your terms, are creative, and some destructive, though the latter are seldom recognized as such.