“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I will try a comprehensible response, however. The child or infant is highly suggestible to parental belief systems, so that it can early be provided with a conceptual framework that is complementary to its surroundings, to the group or environment.

The child at such a time for one thing is not in the situation to do conflict with belief systems—it is too young and dependent. The belief systems can be like blocks, which are used and then later changed or replaced, but there is a kind of (underlined) bonding of the childhood self with those ideas it takes from its parents.

Right there, the child is presented with a quandary, of course. (Pause.) Children and adults also need self-respect. The church itself, again, had an elaborate system within which the Sinful Self could be at least momentarily redeemed, sins confessed and so forth—so within that system the pressures set up by the entire concept were at least momentarily lessened through such releases.

There were all kinds of aids available: indulgences, litanies, rosaries and so forth. When Ruburt left that system intellectually some of the old bonding power remained, the emotional glue, but he no longer believed in the indulgences, the sacraments and so forth, so the Sinful Self was left fairly isolated, still believing to some extent that to “be good” it must be bad, but without the releases of guilt once provided by churchly help and belief.

(Long pause at 8:46.) Give us a moment.... Science provided no such releases, of course, for it looked upon all such values to begin with as meaningless, including the entire concept of the soul. For some time there was no direct challenge, however, made to the Sinful Self once Ruburt left the church. His creative abilities were growing and developing, his concepts enlarging, but he was for some time so convinced of science’s viewpoint that the ideas of the Sinful Self were looked upon as unworthy and superstitious. He was allied with rationalism instead. Many issues therefore remained unresolved, lying there unchallenged. When his creative abilities found contemporary scientific thought also too narrow, however, and his natural intuitions had led him toward a new framework—one that, again, introduced values having to do with the nature of consciousness, or soul—then the new ideas began to conflict directly with the old buried ones, particularly those that had to do with the conflicts between creative expression, the church, and “forbidden knowledge.” To go ahead creatively, forming new versions of a spiritual reality, to state that man and his impulses were good, brought him finally into direct conflict with the old beliefs of the Sinful Self, whose value system was based upon the idea that the self was indeed sinful, not to be trusted.