“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.

What I have said, of course, applies as much to Buddha as it does to Christ: Both accepted the inner projections and then tried to physically represent these. They were more, however, than the sum of those projections. This also should be understood. Mohammedanism fell far short. In this case the projections were of violence predominating. Love and kinship were secondary to what indeed amounted to baptism and communion through violence and blood.

The Hebrews conceived of an overseer god, an angry and just and sometimes cruel god; and many sects denied, then, the idea that other living beings beside man possessed inner spirits. The earlier beliefs represented a far better representation of inner reality, in which man, observing nature, let nature speak and reveal its secrets.

(9:45.) The Hebrew god, however, represented a projection of a far different kind. Man was growing more and more aware of the ego, of a sense of power over nature, and many of the later miracles are presented in such a way that nature is forced to behave differently than in its usual mode. God becomes man’s ally against nature.

(10:24.) God, therefore, became an idea projected outward, independent of the individual, divorced from nature. He became the reflection of man’s emerging ego, with all of its brilliance, savagery, power, and intent for mastery. The adventure was a highly creative one despite the obvious disadvantages, and represented an “evolution” of consciousness that enriched man’s subjective experience, and indeed added to the dimensions of reality itself.

(10:38.) So the concept of God began to change as the ego recognized its reliance upon inner reality, but the drama had to be worked out within the current framework. Mohammedanism was basically so violent precisely because Christianity was basically so gentle. Not that Christianity was not mixed with violence, or that Mohammedanism was devoid of love. But as the psyche went through its developments and battled with itself, denying some feelings and characteristics and stressing others, so the historic religious exterior dramas represented and followed these inner aspirations, struggles, and searches.

(Slower now): All of this material now given must be considered along with the fact that beneath these developments there are the eternal aspects and creative characteristics of a force that is both undeniable and intimate. All That Is, in other words, represents the reality from which all of us spring. (Pause, one of several.) All That Is, by its nature, transcends all dimensions of activity, consciousness, or reality, while being a part of each.

(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.

The journeys of the gods, therefore, represent the journeys of man’s own consciousness projected outward. All That Is, however, is within each such adventure. Its consciousness, and its reality, is within each man, and within the gods he has created. That last is in small letters, and gods shall always be in small letters. All That Is is capitalized.

They represent, however, deep unities that you do not understand. Your conception of good and evil results in large part from the kind of consciousness you have presently adopted. You do not perceive wholes, but portions. The conscious mind focuses with a quick, limited, but intense light, perceiving from a given field of reality only certain “stimuli.” It then puts these stimuli together, forming the liaison of similarity. Anything that it does not accept as a portion of reality, it does not perceive.