“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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

Give us a moment.... As a people you are geared, say, to the exploration of the physical world. You climb mountains. It seldom occurs to you as a people that inner landscapes are as real, or that there are, say, psychological structures, usually unperceived, that are quite as real as any physical one. You are unable to see your own events as they interrelate with others. You do not understand that an idea can indeed change the world, unless you see firmly that the idea has a factual basis.