“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: the message of the Christ entity was, in religious terms “You are all children of God—the ‘sinner’ as well as the saint.” Indeed, according to the original Christ thesis, while a man could sin, no man was identified as a sinner. He was not identified with his failures or limitations, but instead with his potential.

The Christ entity knew the vitality, power, and strength of myths. That vitality allows for different readings, of course, and through man’s changing development he reads his myths differently, yet they serve as containers for intuitional knowledge.

Christ’s thesis was inserted into a Jewish tradition dealing deeply with guilt, and the new thesis was meant to temper that tradition, and to spread beyond it. Instead, while carrying the belief in man’s potential, Christianity smothered the thesis beneath a slag heap of old guilt. Guilt can be used to manipulate people, of course, and it is a fine tool in the hands of government, religion, science, or any large organization that wants to retain its power.

Christ dealt with myths, once again—potent ones that stood for inner realities. Christ clothed those realities in colorful stories geared to people’s understanding. I am using the name here, Christ, as one person for the sake of discussion, for that entity touched many lives, each leaping into a kind of super-reality as it joyfully played its part in the religious drama.

The message was “Do not condemn yourself or others,” for Christ well knew that self-righteous condemnation of the self or of one’s neighbors served to darken the door through which man might view his own potential and its greater source.

In our terms, All That Is exists in Framework 2 as elsewhere, but Framework 2 represents the source of your known physical reality. From it flow all of the known facts of your world. Christ hoped to show that you survived death psychically and spiritually—that you “returned” to the father in heaven. Literal minds, looking for evidential proof, would insist that the physical body itself must rise, ascending, hence the related stories, the misinterpretation of data. “Ask, and you shall receive.” Christ well knew that that statement was indeed true, but men who condemned themselves, who considered themselves sinners, would not know what to ask for, except punishment to relieve their guilt. Hence he stressed time and time again that each person was a child of God.

The words “Let thy will be done,” represented excellent psychological understanding, for according to Christ’s teachings as originally given, God the father represented the source or parent of the self, who was by nature free from the self’s ignorance or lack of understanding at any given time, and who would know better than the known self those experiences that would fulfill the self’s hopes, dreams, and potentials.

(10:06.) Give us a moment.... To be a child of God was to trust in your own worth. You could admit failings, transgressions of one kind or another without identifying yourself, say, with failure. The child of God would automatically find salvation, and everyone was a child of God. When Christ said “Believe in me, and you will be saved,” he meant “Believe in your relationship to God, in that you are his son, as I am, and you will surely be saved.” Again, he spoke in religious terms, for those were the terms of the times. This knowledge, however, of the innate goodness of the self literally gives the individual the inner support necessary for the exercise of man’s fullest potentials.

In civil and governmental terms, such a policy could not be tolerated—nor has man yet learned how to deal with that basic principal. It is almost automatic, for example, to label a man a murderer, and identify him with his crime. The society never came to terms with the vast complications inherent with Christ’s teachings, and so it abandoned them. Man’s great exuberant spontaneity has never been allowed its full sweep as a result.

(“This is off the subject, but your material about Christ reminded me of a letter we received from a young woman not long ago. She wanted to know what really happened to Christ, if he wasn’t crucified.”)

(Eyes closed:) There were several men who together performed the exploits reported in the Christ story—exploits occurring only roughly in the 33-year period given (for Christ’s life).

A man was crucified, but he was not one who made up the Christ entity. You understand from stories that have come to you the elaborations and half-truths that people can be convinced are true. None of the men who made up that entity were crucified. They each died—one I believe in India. People do not understand that their dreams become reality, and that the greater dramas of history and myth often bear little resemblance to the actual occurrences, but are greater than the physical events.

(10:53 PM. See Chapter 21 of Seth Speaks for more on the Christ entity. According to history, Christ was crucified, and the other two members of Seth’s Christ entity, John the Baptist and St. Paul, were beheaded. Seth hasn’t mentioned India before in connection with any of the three, so that information would be new. It would be interesting to get more data on the whole Christ question. As I told Jane after the session, Seth’s Christ material tonight reminded me of the idea of the Christ book, which Seth mentioned in Personal Reality.)