“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The concepts of God that you have, have gone hand-in-hand with the development of your consciousness. The ego, emerging, needed to feel its dominance and control, and so it imagined a dominant god apart from nature. Often nations acted as group egos — each with its own god-picturing, its own concepts of power. Whenever a tribe or a group or a nation decided to embark upon a war, it always used the concept of its god to lead it on.

(Faster at 10:45:) The god concept then was an aid, and an important one, to man’s emerging ego. To develop its sense of specialization, the ego forgot the great cooperative venture of the earth. If a hunter literally knows his relationship with an animal, he cannot kill it. On deeper levels both animal and man understand the connections. Biologically the man knows he has come from the earth. Some of his cells have been the cells of animals, and the animal knows he will look out through a man’s eyes.³ The earth venture is cooperative. The slain beast is tomorrow’s hunter. In terms of ego consciousness, however, there were stages of growth; and the god concepts that spoke of oneness with nature were not those that served the ego’s purposes in the line of development as you understand it (deliberately).

In your probability you did allow the inner self some freedom. Therefore, the so-called egotistical consciousness was not given complete sway. It remained flexible enough so that even hidden in its god concepts⁴ there were symbols of greater reality. Your system deals with physical manipulability, again, and the translation of creativity into physical form. An exterior separation had to occur for a while, in which consciousness forgot, egotistically speaking, that it was a part of nature, and pretended to be apart.

The great emotion of love has been thus far poorly used, yet it represents even the biological impetus of your being. Your religions in a large measure have taught you to hate yourselves and physical existence. They have told you to love God, but rarely taught you to experience the gods in yourselves.

(Intently:) I am saying that the individual self must become consciously aware of far more reality; that it must allow its recognition of identity to expand so that it includes previously unconscious knowledge. To do this you must understand, again, that man must move beyond the concepts of one god, one self, one body, one world, as these ideas are currently understood.⁵ You are now poised, in your terms, upon a threshold from which the race can go many ways. There are species of consciousness. Your species is in a time of change. There are potentials within the body’s mechanisms, in your terms, not as yet used. Developed, they can immeasurably enrich the race, and bring it to levels of spiritual and psychic and physical fulfillment. If some changes are not made, the race as such will not endure.

4. For material on probabilities, the god concept, and religion, see chapters 14–17 and 21 in Seth Speaks, and Chapter 17 in Adventures in Consciousness.