“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Such bonding provides a sense of safety and focus. The belief system may in fact be negatively attuned while still providing that overall value. The bonding is not meant to be permanent, however, and after a while the child begins to question its affiliations, the ways and means vary according to cultures. Some cultures provide symbols, or symbolic steps within the system itself, that allow for a steady “progression,” in which a young person’s curiosity and accelerated adolescent rebellion is subtly directed from within the society itself.

(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.

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.

When the person is a child no longer that need no longer exists in the same fashion. People often throw off their childhood beliefs then and begin to look for their own view of reality, once again. They may then count the more negative aspects of their backgrounds in a rather concentrated manner, for the system no longer serves to provide its psychological support. The person is forced to find fresh, more original solutions.

Now each individual is also given ways and means of a highly personal nature, characteristics or abilities that automatically begin to lead it out of such old belief systems, when those characteristics are allowed their freedom. They will lead the individual toward their own built-in feelings of support and safety.

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.

(9:33.) The strong bonding elements that were once of importance have served their purposes, and no longer soften the more unfortunate beliefs connected with such systems’ beliefs. They may appear in frenzied outbursts—all the more frenzied—because the original purpose of the culture has deserted it. Its integrity has been undermined. Its reconciling forces no longer really operate, and only its rough edges show.