“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The practical experience of reality is formed through the suggestive psychological idea-shapes that appear in the guise of theories, dogmas, and assumptions. [...]

Ruburt went from a strict religion, embracing both Darwin finally, and Freud also, as liberators from old doctrines—not realizing of course that he was substituting one dogma for two, period.

(I also think it quite evident that Seth began to go into those attributes we’re born with in light of my comments about current psychological dogma that the infant is born without any impetuses …

[...] See the 640th session for February 14, 1973: “Natural ‘mystical’ experience, unclothed in dogma, is the original religious therapy that is so often distorted in ecclesiastical organizations, but it represents man’s innate recognition of his oneness with the source of his own being, and of his experience.”

[...] Few even wonder if it can be done … The visions that don’t agree with the various religious and mystical dogmas, that aren’t couched in terms of Christ, Jehovah, or Buddha, might well represent holes in the official picture through which a glimmer of inner reality seeps…. [...]

[...] There have been bloody wars fought on the same account, and private persecutions in which those who did not agree with one or another’s religious dogmas were quite simply killed “for the good of their souls.”

[...] Man’s imagination can carry him into those other realms — but when he tries to squeeze those truths into frameworks too small, he distorts and bends inner realities so that they become jagged dogmas.

That freedom, however, of course has been highly limited in nature, for the dogma of Christianity still largely held. [...]

[...] Both of them believed that women were inferior, and quite unknowingly they followed a Freudian dogma.

Now the church finally placed all of the condemnation of its religious laws against certain psychological and mystical experiences — not because it did not consider them realities, of course, but precisely because it recognized too well the disruptive influence that, say, revelationary experience could have upon a world order that was based upon a uniform dogma.

[...] Otherwise it becomes another closed system of thought, bathed in absolutism, and doomed to the weightiness of dogma. [...]

[...] Dogmas are then set up about them so that only a certain body of data is considered acceptable. [...]

[...] Until a very few years ago it was medical dogma that the immune system was entirely independent of any “outside” influence. [...]

[...] (We also have deep reservations about the theory of evolution and its “survival of the fittest” dogmas, but this isn’t the place to go into those subjects.) Far more basic and satisfactory to us are the intuitive comprehensions that this “nature” we’ve helped create is a living manifestation of All That Is, and that someplace, somewhere within its grand panorama, each action has meaning and is truly redeemed. [...]

[...] They upset him to some extent—not for himself, but because he did not want to hurt other people who so believed in the dogma that he was disclosing to the world. [...]

[...] In such concepts any natural goodness, or natural intent in man becomes not only invisible psychologically to the fanatic, but man’s natural nature appears as a direct threat to the ideal projected by dogma of any kind.

[...] His poetry was accepted and praised artistically, when the ideas agreed with dogma.

[...] Applied with a heavy hand they become unnecessary dogma, rigidly limiting experience. [...] So there are psychic customs as there are physical ones, religious and psychic dogmas, guided tours of consciousness in which you are told to follow a certain line or a certain program. [...]

The creativity for which Ruburt was praised as a child—the writing of his poetry, for example, became more and more frowned upon by the church as he became older, and in particular when the poetry contained concepts that did not fit Christian dogma. [...]

[...] This resulted of course in an overemphasis upon dogma — rules and the ritualization that had to be colorful and rich because it would be the one outlet allowed in which creativity could be handled. [...]

All such dogmas use artificial guilt, and natural guilt is distorted to serve those ends. [...]

[...] In other words, you should be as flexible mentally, psychologically, and spiritually as possible, open to new ideas, creative, and not overly dependent upon organizations or dogma.

[...] They help create the dogma or system or cult to which they “fall prey.” [...]

[...] Science allied with the government has its own dogmas, however (intently), so the civilized world will be looking for new alternatives. [...]