“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Witches” were not considered insane, for example, or deranged, for their psychological beliefs fit in only too well with those of the general populace. They were considered evil instead. (Pause.) The vast range of psychological expression, however, had some kind of framework to contain it. (Pause.) The saint and the sinner (pause) each had access to great depths of possible heroism or despair. Psychological reality, for all of the religious (pause) dangers placed upon it, was anything but a flat-surfaced experience. It was in fact because the church so believed in the great range of psychological activity possible that it was so dogmatic and tireless in trying to maintain order.

(Long pause at 9:33.) Unfortunately, with the development of the scientific era, a development occurred that need not have happened. As I have mentioned before, science’s determination to be objective almost immediately brought about a certain artificial shrinking of psychological reality. What could not be proven in the laboratory was presumed not to exist at all.

Anyone who experienced “something that could not exist” was therefore to some extent or another deluded or deranged. There is no doubt that the accepted dimensions of psychological reality began to shrink precisely at the time that modern psychology began. (Long pause.) Modern psychology was an attempt to make man conform to the new scientific world view.

It was an attempt to fit man within the picture of evolution, and to manufacture a creature whose very existence was somehow pitted against itself. Evolutionary man, with Darwinian roots, could not be a creature with a soul. It had to have hidden in its psychological roots the bloody remnants of the struggle for survival that now cast it in its uneasy role. (Pause.) There is no doubt that the church cast the soul in a position of stress, caught as it was between its heavenly source and original sin — but there was a sense of psychological mobility involved, one that saw continued existence after death.

The new psychology shut off mobility after death, while giving each individual an unsavory primitive past heritage — a heritage genetically carried, that led finally only to the grave. (Long pause.) Psychological activity was scaled down in between life and death, then, even while the possibility of any after-death experience was considered the most unreasonable and unintellectual of speculations.

(Long pause at 9:43.) Any man might rise in your democracy from a poor peasant’s son to be the President. Outcasts might become the socially prominent. The unlettered might become highly educated. The idea of achieving greatness, however, was considered highly suspect. The self was kept in bounds. Great passion, or desire or intent — or genius — did not fit the picture.

(Long pause.) Now some peoples would not fit into that mold. They would take what they could from your technology, but in conscious and spontaneous ways they retaliated — and still do — by exaggerating all of those human tendencies that your society has held down so well. If you can have reason without faith, then indeed, for example, you will see that there can be faith without reason. When human experience becomes shrunken in such a fashion — compressed — then in a fashion it also explodes at both ends, you might say.

Now, in the world you (to me) early formed your own beliefs and strategies. In midlife you were presented with our sessions — or [the two of] you presented yourselves with them, if you prefer. You recognized the overall vitality of our material (long pause) — but again, you did not realize that it meant a complete reorientation of your attitudes. You did not realize that you were being presented, not merely with an alternate view of reality, but with the closest approximation you could get of what reality was, and how it worked, and what it meant.

Now: For Ruburt, I want him to remember the idea of effortlessness, because with the best of intentions he has been trying too hard. (Pause.) I want him to remember that relaxation is one of creativity’s greatest champions — not its enemy. He is naturally gifted with the quickness of body and mind. Remind him that it is safe to express his natural (underlined) rhythms, to remember the natural person. Your most vital inspirations are effortlessly yours. I want you to see how many of your beliefs are the result of the old framework, for in that way you will find yourselves releasing yourselves more and more, so that your own strengths come to your support.