“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.

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.