“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: on your television screen this evening you saw a little girl (in a European country). She said that she had asked in a prayer for proof of God’s existence. After a short time an earthquake occurred (in Romania), and the child was afraid that she had caused it. She was convinced that God had answered her prayer thusly.

Because of the beliefs of religion, the child expected God to show his power through some disastrous act by which sinners would be punished. That child’s life already carries the marks of her beliefs about religion, God, power, and mainly in the belief that nature is a tool in the God’s hands—to be used against man at any time.

When man identified with the grandeur and energy of nature, then he knew nature’s reasons, for they were his own as well. He knew his death, his personal death, was only a transition, for his identification allowed him to feel the mobility of his consciousness, and allowed him to feel a sense of communion with the passing seasons, and with the ever-constant renewal of plants and fields. He did not need to look for a reason for nature’s destructive aspects, for he knew through experience the great sweep of its vitality. He knew no Gods were sending down vengeance.

(10:06.) That inner knowledge is behind all of his myths. It is said that there must be something, surely, to the story of Christ, since civilization was so altered. And for one-thousand, nine-hundred and seventy-eight years Christianity has flourished in one way or another. For a time it fueled both the arts and political life. It peopled the world of man with saints, sinners, priests, and it peopled space with a God, a legion of angels, and a devil and his cohorts—so surely Christianity must be based upon fact.

When people say this of course they mean that fact is true and myth is false. If I say there was very little factual basis for Christianity’s beginning, then people will interpret this to mean that Christ’s reality had no basis in truth. That is not what I am saying. There were other religions in other times that held a sway over civilizations for far longer periods. There were changes, but in general the religions of the Egyptians and the ancient Greeks are cases in point. The longevity of those religions and their effects upon those ancient civilizations are certainly not taken by “modern men” as proof that those religions had any basis in fact. Instead, they are considered as myths, pagan stories. Those peoples considered their Gods to be quite real, to have a basis in historical fact. Those religions had as great an effect upon their cultures as Christianity has had upon your own.

The first Gods began the process of man’s exterior consciousness, so that the portions of nature with which he no longer identified were gradually deified, and put outside of himself. I have told you that your physical habits of perception are learned, and that the world can indeed be physically put together in different fashions. Events such as hallucinations give you hints of this.

At first, then, men perceived the Gods physically. These perceptions were different however than what you think of as ordinary ones. They appeared and disappeared as man perceived, and then did not perceive, these inner realities. These inner realities were “real.” These were what you might call vital, responding personages, born of emotions of creativity. Perhaps you could compare them to the natural psychic or emotional equivalent, the psychological equivalent, of nature’s clouds, sun, storms, or seasons.

(Long pause at 10:47.) The greater creative drama involved occurred for centuries. Christ tried to tell men that he was everywhere, but they could not understand. He did not want a church, but an inner brotherhood. He was not born of a virgin, nor was his physical history any more factual than that once given for Zeus, or Apollo, or the Egyptian gods. His reality however did change the consciousness of man.

Historically speaking, the ancients understood man’s psychology, his psyche, far better than you do now, for they were far more aware of its context. Their identification with nature gave them a sense of man’s emotional power. They understood that dreams represented a reality as valid as the physical one, and they did not see the two worlds as separate. The early gods carried remnants of that grandeur.