“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.

I am speaking in your terms of time, now. Individuals born into your time do not feel, say, the same sense of familiarity with the religious belief systems of past lives. (Pause.) Your age requires a greater sense of freedom and curiosity. In any case, the original innocent self is bonded to the parents, and to the parents’ beliefs for a time. This provides the necessary sense of safety and the sense of definition in which the child can safely use its explorative abilities.

(Long pause.) Those creative elements of personality must then to some extent or another finally communicate with the “Sinful Self” directly—sympathetically embrace that self (pause) as the part of personality that first accepted cultural and religious beliefs with all of their negative and positive influences. The more creative portion of personality must then realize that in a fashion it exists because the Sinful Self did. Those negative beliefs then no longer seem so frightening. The taboos within lose their power, and the Sinful Self is seen as (long pause)representing the stage of growth through which the self is passing (intently).

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).