“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We sat for the session at 8:10. We wanted Seth to comment on the DMSO, and on Jane’s very swollen right foot. [The left foot has lost some of its original swelling, and now appears much better by contrast.] I told Jane I thought Seth was correct in the deleted session for June 24, 1981, in which he said the swelling effect helps cushion the new motion of some joints, so there is no grating. I also told her I thought another reason applied, however, one that led to the swelling to begin with. She is waiting apprehensively to see what the public’s reaction to God of Jane is. Although a few hundred copies of this book may have been shipped, it hasn’t really come out yet. The idea had come to me some days ago that Jane’s foot troubles were directly related to her fears of being accepted in a controversial role. “I thought you knew something like that was going on.” I said. She shook her head: “I don’t know what I think. I’d like him to say something about the DMSO, and that material I got this afternoon, and maybe the foot....”)

(An interesting debate emerged between us as we waited for the session to begin. When Jane read her material of this afternoon to me, I thought she likened the Sinful Self’s renewal to reincarnation, meaning that she thought this renewal might account for many of our overt ideas of reincarnation—that at least some of our ideas about reincarnation were based upon our intuitive knowledge of the return of portions of one’s self to that earlier state of innocence—a rebirth, in other words, that we might translate into the idea of physical incarnation. So when I agreed with Jane this afternoon, it was partly for that reason.

(But tonight she maintained that she’d never mentioned the subject of reincarnation in her paper, and that she hadn’t meant reincarnation in that sense at all. So I was left frustrated, wondering what she’d said that I had mistranslated into that word. After being initially upset, I rather humorously thought that my idea wasn’t a bad one anyhow.

Briefly—as mentioned—the child has a great sense of curiosity and wonder. That field of exploration is so vast, however, that it needs boundaries and determinations also. (Pause.) Although Ruburt did not mention this in his paper, reincarnation does have a part to play, for child’s curiosity must somehow be fitted into a new social structure, generally speaking, from other reincarnational ones. Therefore it becomes “bonded” to the parents in a given life, and then bonded to the beliefs shared by the family group.

(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.

(Long pause.) The original ideas connected with the Sinful Self’s beliefs were at one time, for example, not as obviously unfortunate, since the system itself also provided for salvation, methods of appeasement and so forth—all of which were thoroughly accepted through many centuries.

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.

More and more people are exploring revelatory information. It is only natural that most of it will simply help channel their own self-transformations by appearing garbed in one way or another in standard religious terms, however exotic that garb (with humor).

The short paper he wrote today, and my last session, should help here, for we are speaking of the transformation of the Sinful Self, sympathetically, as it is seen as a psychological structure of growth and change—a stage through which the self traveled—one that is no longer necessary and can now instead turn to a new state of innocence.