“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We’d thought that Seth might refer to them in the session for last Monday, but none was held because once again Jane was so relaxed on the couch after supper. She was also somewhat blue and discouraged. In fact, I hadn’t expected a session tonight until she called me at 8:40, so relaxed was she. She’s been sleeping much better generally, though, is still taking a nap in the late morning as well as our usual nap break just before supper. She’s also been heading for bed a half hour earlier at night.

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.

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.

There are, however, classic connections between creative thought and heresy, between established belief and the danger of revelatory material as being disruptive—first of church and then of state.

(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.

(Half joking, I said to Jane, “What did you think of that? Are you trying to tell me religion has been in back of this all of the time? I thought you left the church. It appears you didn’t leave it at all.... I’ll have to arrange for an exorcism for you.”

(“I thought it might,” Jane said. “I’ll have milk and a cookie to take my aspirin with, then I’ll go in the bedroom at 10:30.”

(I suggested to Jane that she see what she might be able to pick up on her own about the French life. I mentioned that Normandy province is in the northwestern corner of France, some 20 miles across the channel from England. I’ve read that it’s predominantly rural in character, and thought that it was probably even more so back in the l6th century. It could have been a grim, if beautiful, setting.