“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

The conventionally religious will be certain that the earthquake is a punishment for sin. The scientist will see the affair as relatively neutral —an event, however, in which man is certainly a pawn, caught by chance in a catastrophe that he would otherwise most certainly avoid. The earthquake is a mass natural catastrophe, seeming then to be perpetrated upon man and his cities by an earth that certainly does not take man or his civilization into consideration.

Private events of tragedy seem in a smaller context to happen without man’s knowledge or without his consent. The overly exteriorized consciousness has cut itself off so that it no longer perceives the inner order of events. The world with its wars or disasters, its illnesses or poverty, its mass or private tragedies, seems to be thrust upon man or to happen—again without his consent.

The emotional identification with nature meant that man had a far greater and richer personal emotional reality. That love of nature, and appreciation, quickened and utilized inner biological capacities, also possessed by plants and animals, so that man was more consciously aware of his part in nature. He identified with natural events. It is almost impossible in your time to describe man’s reality when he was consciously aware that he would die and yet not die, and when he was everywhere surrounded by those inner data of his psyche.

Those data were equal in his experience to those physical data of the world, so that the two kinds of experience constantly enriched each other. Man then understood that he did form his own reality in all of its aspects, both privately and en masse, and in terms of natural earth events, as well as for example the events of his society. You cannot of course limit your world to the world of facts at any given time, though you may try to do so. That little girl’s experience with the earthquake, and her beliefs about it, have little to do with the bare facts involved. She is dealing instead with an inner world of myths.

Myths are far more powerful than any facts, and they carry with them the great sway of nature’s own emotional force as it is interpreted through man’s experience. Facts certainly seem to be provable in your world. Myths are generally considered to be distorted facts, interpreted by primitive minds, or the result of creative acts of the imagination. That power is little understood, much less its reasons.

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.

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.

They are quite as real in the emotional landscape of man’s psyche, as the elements of the skyscape are above his planet. Myths always weave in and out of historical context, even as dreams are related to daily life. Myths usually include, then, some “provable facts,” either of people historically known to have lived, or in terms of places or physical events of a natural kind. These are often taken then as proof that the myth is fact.

The interweaving of “dream reality” with the world of facts, however, is precisely what causes a myth to begin with, and is the source of its tremendous power, for it combines the two realities into a construct powerful enough to charge civilizations with new vitality, and literally to reshape man’s course. Fact alone could never do that.

Both before and after “the time of Christ,” as historically given, there were men who claimed to be the messiah. The messiah was a myth waiting for factual clothes. Many men tried on the fit. In a manner of speaking, now, it would make little difference which man was finally given the kingly robes—for the greater reality of the dream was so encompassing that it would come to be, whether one or 10 or 20 men’s lives were historically joined together to form the Christ.

(10:37.) Christ tried to return man to nature. In a manner of speaking, again, there was no one Christ, historically speaking, but the personage of Christ, or the entity, was the reality from which the entire dramatic story emerged.

One of Christ’s purposes, meaning the entity, was to teach man to see beyond the so-called facts of existence; not to deny death’s physical event, but to show the greater dimensions of that event, and man’s emergence into a new reality.

(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.