“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I do not want to go into a history of culture here, but your organizations historically have largely been built upon your religious concepts, which have indeed been extremely rigid. In the light of those concepts, artistic expression has been channeled, focused, directed along certain lines. It has been discouraged along other lines. The repressive nature of Christian thought in the Middle Ages, for example, is well known.

Expression itself was considered highly suspect if it traveled outside of the accepted precepts, and particularly of course if it led others to take action against those precepts. To some extent the same type of policy is still reflected in your current societies, though science or the state itself may serve instead of the church as the voice of authority.

Behind such ideas is of course the central point of Christianity, or one of the central points at least, that earthly man is a sinful creature. He is given to sin. In that regard his natural expression must be closely guarded. It must be directed toward officialdom, and outside of that boundary lay, particularly in the past, the very uncomfortable realm of the heretic.

(Pause at 9:15.) Again, many people carry the same kind of emotional charge. Ruburt’s fears, as expressed in that material, can be encountered, of course. It is when they are hidden that difficulties arise, because their charge is then added to other issues.

(9:28. A very significant sentence:) The entire structure of fears, of course, is based upon a belief in the sinful self and the sinful nature of the self’s expression.

Outside of that context, none of those fears make any sense at all (equally important, of course). In a large regard the church through the centuries ruled through the use of fear far more than the use of love. It was precisely in the area of artistic expression, of course, that the inspirations might quickest leap through the applied dogmatic framework. The political nature of inspirational material of any kind was well understood by the church.

By such tactics the church managed to hold on to an entire civilization for centuries. (Long pause.) Ruburt well knew even as a child that such structures had served their time, and his poetry provided a channel through which he could express his own views as he matured. Later the old fears, if they surfaced, were not encountered. They seemed beneath him, unworthy or cowardly—but in any case their validity as feelings was not recognized or understood.

(Long pause at 9:37.) Ruburt had considerable difficulty with church doctrine even then, and the rules of the order as actually carried out through practice were later considered to hold their own seeds of heresy. Ruburt was forced to leave the order that he had initiated, as an old woman. He left with a few female companions who were also ostracized, and died finally of starvation. It was a time when unconventional patterns of thought, of unconventional expression, could have dire consequences.

Both the nightmare experience and the dream were partially triggered by our last session (on March 4), of course, and served to show Ruburt why he had begun to cut down on some (underlined) of his own psychic experience, inspiration, and expression—a policy reflected in the repressed nature of bodily expression.