“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Straight-laced people have often frowned upon the use of the imagination, considering it most disruptive. (Pause.) From the beginning Ruburt has questioned whether or not our material gave a true explanation of reality—or at least presented one that was as approximately true as possible. Or were only creative hypotheses being offered? Was the material true or false?

In that same framework then the nature of my own reality also of course comes into question. Am I an independent personality, who has indeed survived not one but many deaths? (Pause.) Inside of that framework you have very few alternatives to deal with. In the first place, as you are learning, your world accepts as valid that portion of an event that can show itself within your recognized time and space coordinates.

(9:01.) When you are dealing with that kind of philosophical investigation, you are more or less forced to look for other definitions. (The noise from the fireplace was now quite loud.) Your very ideas of the nature of reality change. You are still to some extent forced to recognize conventional structures and organizations, including psychological ones. At the same time you search for greater evidence of a vastly different kind of reality. (Long pause.) The larger facts about psychological reality, for example, cannot be fitted to the world’s definitions. You can only get versions and interpretations. Translations and dramatizations that serve to give you glimpses of psychological structures whose very natures do not fit the facts of the world (all intently.

(Pause.) Creative abilities are most helpful in that regard, for they are able to stretch recognizable concepts to their uttermost, allowing you some glimpses of organizations too vast for your own world’s dimensionalities.

(9:14.) The yes-or-no, true-or-false categories simply do not work when you are dealing with such issues. (Long pause.) In that regard it is important that he realize this. The entire concept of the Sinful Self can only exist at certain levels of experience. It can only seem to make sense in a very limited context. (Pause.) The creative abilities most often serve as psychological bridges, enabling man to conceive of the existence of realities outside of his own particular point of reference. They can hint at the greater diversity of being, the larger dimension of events. They can present dramatizations. They can serve as thresholds (long pause), but they cannot contain direct experience themselves with events that are intrinsically beyond those reaches.

(Long pause.) In that regard, the attempt to be too literal is of no benefit. Religions have gone astray, of course, by insisting upon the literal interpretation of symbolic material. I am not saying that there are no greater facts, but that those greater facts cannot be contained within your system as themselves.

(Long pause.) Basic reality deals with far more than any true or false category, and the deeper dimensions of actuality contain the source material from which, indeed, your true or false world emerges—so it does Ruburt no particular good to overconcern himself. Our material is the best approximation, the best approximate model you can perceive of a vaster psychological field of existence.

(Long pause.) You are in the position of living in the ordinary world, while sensing those other fields of actuality in which that world has its existence. The Sinful Self idea can be detrimental in particular when it is faced by experience that must necessarily fall outside of its realm of reference. Both church and science, again, possess a deep suspicion of unofficial or revelatory knowledge, for this must necessarily involve the insertion of new information into a system unable to explain any facts but its own.

(Pause.) In that regard, the questions of Ruburt’s “Sinful Self” must indeed seem to it most alarming, for it possesses no frame of reference in which its own questions can be answered. These very passages are meant to help open the door of understanding, so that the Sinful Self itself can understand why it feels as it does, so that it can also realize that there are other systems in which its questions can at least be considered.

(Long pause.) Its fears of such feelings, rather than the feelings themselves, cause difficulties, for the repression keeps the Sinful Self forever locked in the past, uneducated, panicky. The release of such feelings allows the Sinful Self some expression, and gives it a sense of communication so that it can indeed be reached by the understanding gained by other portions of the self—a highly important point.