“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is not true, of course, that before the time of modern psychology man had a concept of himself that dealt with conscious exterior aspects only, although it has been written that until that time man thought of himself as a kind of flat-surfaced self — minus, for example, subconscious or unconscious complexity.

Instead, previous to psychology’s entrance, before psychology mapped the acceptable or forbidden, the dangerous or safe compartments of the self, man used the word “soul” to include his own entire complexity. That word was large enough to contain man’s experience. It was large enough to provide room for conventional and unconventional, bizarre and ordinary states of mind and experience. It was roomy enough to hold images of reality that were physically perceived or psychologically perceived.

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.

(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.

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.