“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.

In medieval times to be excommunicated was no trivial incident, but an event harkening severance that touched the soul, the body, and all political, religious and economic conditions by which the two were tied together.

Many people’s economic well-being of course was dependent upon the church in one way or another, and in reincarnational terms many millions of people alive today were familiar then with such conditions. The nunneries and monasteries were long-time social and religious institutions, some extremely rigorous, while others were religiously oriented in name only. But there is a long history of the conflicts between creative thought, heresy, excommunication, or worse, death. All of those factors were involved in one way or another in the fabric of Ruburt’s nightmare material.

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.

Ruburt did initiate a small religious order in the 16th Century, in France, and he was in love for many years with the man he met in his dream—a cleric. The love was not consummated, but it was passionate and enduring nonetheless on both of their parts.

The dream representing his grandfather symbolically allowed him to go back to the past in this life, to a time of severe shock—his grandfather’s death—which occurred when he was beginning to substitute scientific belief for religious belief, wondering if his grandfather’s consciousness then fell back into a mindless state of being, into chaos, as science would certainly seem to suggest.