“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Oh, Lord,” I said, joking. For I was embroiled in trying to produce a note relative to a passage of Seth’s in Mass Events about Christ’s resurrection and ascension. For several reasons, interruptions among them, I’d found it difficult to get into the work, and had spent the weekend reading to remind myself of background material. I wanted the note to be coherent, without going into too much detail. Jane has also contributed an excellent paragraph of material for it. As I have before, I found the whole religious issue confusing and contradictory. And the last thing I’d expected of Jane tonight was any material on religion from Seth. Obviously, my own hassles about the subject were prompting her efforts, I thought.

(Jane’s delivery for Seth seemed to be the same as ever, except that she took longer pauses between sentences — almost as though she waited a bit each time to gather the impetus to deal with her very relaxed physical state. But the material is excellent, as usual, and I will be working with it while doing the note for Mass Events.)

He arose from the tomb and ascended into heaven. The resurrection and the ascension are indeed, however, the two parts of one dramatic event. (Pause.) Dogmatically, arising from the dead alone was clearly not sufficient, for men were to follow where Christ led. You could not have a world in which the newly-risen dead mixed with the living. An existence in a spiritual realm had to follow such a resurrection.

(Long pause at 9:05.) I have told you, however, that the world of events springs from the world of ideas. It seems certain that “something” happened “back then” (as I often remark) — and that if you could go back there, invisibly studying the century, you would discover the birth of Christianity (also as I’ve remarked, although I prefer to say that “I’d like to see what did happen”). But Christianity was not born at that time. (Long pause.) You might say that the labor pains (intently) were happening then, but the birth itself did not emerge for some time later.

Jewish shepherds represented the placenta that was meant to be discarded, for it was Jewish tradition that nourished the new religion in its early stages before its birth. Christ, as you know, was a common name, so when I say that there was a man named Christ involved in those events (see Seth Speaks), I do not mean to say that he was the biblical Christ. His life was one of those lives that were finally used to compose the composite image of the biblical Christ.

(Pause.) You must understand the long trail of psychological reality that exists before you have a physical event. You must understand man’s need and capacity for fulfillment, dramatization, and psychic creativity.

There is nothing that happened in those times that is not happening now in your own: You have numberless gurus, people who seemingly perform miracles (and some do). So there were in those days some rather disconnected events that served as the focus point for great psychic activity: People wanted to believe, and their belief changed the course of history. It doesn’t matter that the events never happened — the belief happened. And the belief was man’s response to (long pause) intuitional knowledge, to inner knowing, and to spiritual comprehension.

(9:25.) These all had to flow into reality, into psychological patterns through man’s own understanding. They had to flow into the events of history as he (underlined) experienced history. They had to touch the times, and they did so by transforming those times for later generations.

I want it understood (pause) that the accomplishment (pause) is breathtaking in its grandeur — more so because man formed from his psyche such a multidimensional spiritual drama that its light struck upon this or that person, this or that place, and formed a story (pause) more powerful than any physical event could be — hence its power (emphatically).