“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause.) All societies basically need the insertion of fresh challenge and knowledge, however, or they stagnate. At the same time, of course, the society wants to maintain its familiar stance. For centuries Christianity served to preserve old frameworks while still allowing for transforming elements and symbolic activities that allowed individuals to assert some independence and originality by moving from one religious symbol, say, to another—still, however, within that larger framework.

(8:44.) In terms of reincarnation, Christianity in numberless cases even served as a uniting framework connecting lives: you could for example theoretically move from one century to another, and while there were social and political changes, the overall cultural framework might well be the same.

One of the church’s most powerful allies was to that extent its understanding of human psychology, for if you left the church or its system, it knew that you still carried many of its beliefs nevertheless—only now you had something like an itch that you could not scratch. Finally, however, Christianity’s structure became too limited.

Religion still serves within your time as such a uniting and also “disruptive” framework. It has so many variations now in the world culture that it allows many individuals to move from one belief system to another while still safely cloaked in religious garb. If you move from sinner to saint or saint to sinner, from Buddhism to fundamentalism of the Christian kind, or from one sect to another, seemingly with a diverse belief system, your growth and transformations are still being provided for by a religious structure.

(9:19. Long pause.) Ruburt is trying to move outside of the picture entirely. Only by so doing, of course, can the larger avenues of knowledge be opened and made available to the society—or to the self. For many centuries creativity itself was firmly directed by Christianity, and to some extent (underlined) Christianity brings with it an air of uneasiness for society—to the extent that any original thought or insight must indeed imply an intrusive force to a world that must exist in a rare balance that is the result of preserving old values and obtaining new knowledge.

There are archaeological ages given to man’s physical history, or the history of the earth, or to the coming or going of the physical events of nature. There are also reincarnational themes that have united people from various centuries. (Pause.) Even though many of the negative aspects of those themes may now be highly apparent—as with the Jews and the Christians, the Arabs or whatever—this is because actually those patterns are breaking up in your time. The original benefits are no longer as readily available as once they were. The itch is still there, but it is harder to scratch.