“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.

(One of the interruptions concerned the overflow of water from a cellar bathroom. Last night I’d discovered that a portion of the cellar floor — including the old “bomb shelter” where I keep our fan mail stored — was covered by a quarter inch of water —just enough to soak into the 2 by 4’s I have the cardboard boxes placed upon [to avoid water!]. If the wooden supports soak up enough water they can bleed into the very porous boxes. So I had some damp correspondence to resurrect — without too much trouble, actually. The plumber cleaned out the house’s sewer line this afternoon, and I spent much time mopping up six full buckets of dirty water.

Now: Christ was not crucified — therefore he did not resurrect, coming out of the tomb, nor did he then ascend into heaven. In the terms of the biblical drama (underlined), however, Christ was crucified.

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.

(Pause.) Now in the facts of history, there was no crucifixion, resurrection, or ascension. In the terms of history there was no biblical Christ (pause), whose life followed the details given. The organization of the church is a historical fact. The power, devotion, and energy, the organizational expertise of Christianity, cannot be disputed. Nor can it be disputed that Christianity was based upon great religious and psychic vision. To some extent it involved the intuitional reorganization of subjective, and then objective, realities.

(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.

The mass psyche was seeking for a change, an impetus, a flowering, a new organization. The idea of a redeemer was hardly new, but ancient in many traditions. As I stated before, that part of the world was filled with would-be messiahs, self-proclaimed prophets, and so forth, and in those terms it was only a matter of time before man’s great spiritual and psychic desires illuminated and filled up that psychological landscape, filling the prepared psychological patterns with a new urgency and intent. There were many throw-away messiahs (with gentle amusement) — men whose circumstances, characteristics, and abilities were almost (musically) the ones needed — who almost (musically) filled the psychic bill, but who were unfitted for other reasons: They were of the wrong race, or their timing was off. Their intersection with space and time did not mesh with the requirements.

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.

(9:38 P.M. Jane agreed with my own surprise that she not only chose to hold the session, but discussed the Christ material. She said that in spite of her being so relaxed, “There Seth was, right there. …” as soon as she went into trance. But now she was just as much at ease as she had been before the session. She had taken many long pauses during her delivery, a few of which I’ve indicated.