“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane continues her improvements, although she’s been having periods of worry and doubt. Now she waited impatiently for Seth to come through: At first I’d thought she would pass up the session. Finally she felt her boy around. “I’m glad,” I joked. “I was afraid he might only get as far as Coleman Avenue — a block away — or someplace like that. I didn’t want to sit around waiting, and wasting my time. …”)

Now —

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.

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.

Even your poor misguided moral/religious organization is saying in its fashion to the scientifically-oriented society: “How is faith not real, then? We’ll change your laws with it. We’ll turn it into power — political power. What will you say then? We have been laughed at for so long. We will see who laughs now.”

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.

(10:14 P.M. Jane had no idea of most of the material in the session — that is, she hadn’t known Seth was going to deliver it. Now, however, she remembered that just before the session she’d picked up the idea that Seth would mention effortlessness in connection with her own situation.)