“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.

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.

The church was quite real to Ruburt as a child, through the priests who came [to the house] regularly, through direct contact with the religious [grade] school, and the support offered to the family. Ruburt’s very early poetry offended Father Boyle, who objected to its themes, and who burned his books on the fall of Rome, so he had more than a hypothetical feeling about such issues. Many of those fears originated long before the sessions, of course, and before he realized that there was any alternative at all between, say, conventional religious beliefs and complete disbelief in any nature of divinity.

(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.

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.