“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Lately Jane has been going over her old notes. She told me that she’d often written that her vision was much improved when her symptoms were better: “The colors are great today,” etc. Now she thought the correlations were obvious, especially since her seeing and reading ability today were much better when she felt better otherwise too. She thought Seth would discuss such relationships this evening.)

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.

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.

(Just as I was about to ask....)

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.

The Christian concept of heaven with its riches, God and his bounty, the source of nature itself—all of this in our terms was a symbolic structure describing in storybook terms the attributes and characteristics of Framework 2.

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.

He also stressed the importance of a childlike belief, knowing that the adult mind was apt to question “How, and when, and in what manner can my request be granted?”

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.

“Let thy will be done” meant “Let me follow those greater dictates of my inner nature.” Even without all of the distortions, that formula worked for centuries in large measure. The God, the source, was put outside of nature, however, finally becoming at last too remote, and the story itself became frayed at the edges as man tried to tie intuitive truths to objective fact.

(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.

You both chafed against the belief of your times, that man was a natural aggressor, tainted from birth, that he was damned by his very nature, condemned by his early childhood background, by original sin, or by his genes. At the same time you were also tainted by those beliefs, and seemed to see evidence for them whenever you looked into your selves, or outward to the world of your fellows. Each person carried the brunt of that self-condemnation. Ruburt is hardly outstanding in having physical difficulties, and overall your lives and the work speak for more of the potential of personality than of personality’s lacks. You set for yourselves a goal of shoving aside all of the beliefs and distortions for yourselves and for others.

(10:28.) Give us a moment.... Spontaneity knows its own order, and freely comes into order. Years ago, before the psychic experience, he was not for example psychically spontaneous to any great degree. He used his writing to hold back and yet contain his innate psychic knowledge. He disapproved of his own dancing, sometimes even of his sexual yearnings. Now those disapprovals simply piled up, with resulting physical difficulties. He would through the years begin to approve of spontaneity in one more area—spontaneity in class, for example—or with Sumari poetry, or in finally approving his own psychic writings. The disapproval was still present, however; yet now and then through the years would come a period of release, of sudden ease and sudden physical improvement—each time when he suspended self-disapproval, and when for your reasons you began to suspend your own.

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.)