“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I have but a few sessions left to check on the copy-edited manuscript for Mass Events. Then I can start correlating it with the first carbon [which we keep], before mailing the manuscript back to Prentice-Hall, probably late this week, for printing. The book is scheduled to be in the stores in May 1981.

Now the church finally placed all of the condemnation of its religious laws against certain psychological and mystical experiences — not because it did not consider them realities, of course, but precisely because it recognized too well the disruptive influence that, say, revelationary experience could have upon a world order that was based upon a uniform dogma.

“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.

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.

(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.

You have atrocious acts committed, along with great heroisms, but each are explosive, representing sudden releases of withheld energies that have in other ways been forbidden, and so man’s mass psyche expresses itself sometimes like explosive fireworks, simply because the release of pressure is necessary.

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.

(10:07.) I have been very gentle in my treatment of your mores and institutions — for I do not want you to be against your world, but for a more fulfilling one. Toward the end of our present book (Dreams), we will be discussing how our ideas can be applied by the individual in terms of value fulfillment, so that individuals can begin to reclaim those dimensions of experience that are indeed your rightful heritage.