“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Begin, Sadat, and Carter are each “God-fearing” men, sincere believers in their causes. How can “God” be for the Jews and against their enemies, the Arabs, as the Jews suppose, and how can God be for the Arabs and against the Jews, as the Arabs suppose? “Decent” God-fearing men, then, must indeed question how the same God can have such different views, and at least wonder if their own nationalistic histories and prejudices may not have distorted the interpretation of God’s word somewhere along the way.

Men have indeed done more harm in the name of God than they have ever done when pursuing their own greedy or ignorant ways. In the name of God, of course, the artifacts of civilizations have been destroyed, libraries ruined—and when such harm is done, in the name of God, then men are trained to feel no guilt. Indeed, their holy sense of righteousness rises in proportion to the harm they have perpetrated against God’s enemy, no matter who or what this might be.

(9:46.) Your ideas of God are put to the test in this meeting (at Camp David), for here men who claim to believe in a merciful God discuss their mortal claims to property and land, and each feels behind him the ancient dictates of an archaic God.

I spoke lately about your communications, and some of their more fortunate ramifications. You have had what amounts to local gods, even though one name may be used, so that Carter can say “We all worship the same God.”

On a conscious level certainly you are not all that God is, for that is the unstated, unmanifest portion of yourself. [...] In those terms your unstated portions “reach backwards to a Source called God,” as various languages can be traced back to their source. Master languages can be compared to the historic gods. Each person alive is a part of the living God, supported in life by the magnificent power of nature, which is God translated into the elements of the earth and the universe.

From one end of reality you shout: “Where is God?” and from the other end the answer comes: “I am Me.” [...] From the other end of reality, God goes shouting: “Who am I?” and finds himself in you. [...] Because God is, you are. Because you are, God is.

[...] In the same manner people search for gods, or a God, out of which all psyches emerged. [...]

[...] The historic gods become equally archaic. [...] The unknown portions of the psyche and its greater horizons, therefore, have often been perceived as gods or as the greater psyches out of which the self emerged — as for example Latin is a source for the Romance languages.

[...] All or most concepts of a god deal with a static god and herein lies the main theological difficulties. [...] Again, there is no static god. When you say, “This is God", then God is already something else. I am using the term God for simplicity’s sake.

Now there is even something like the idea of a personality god, but hardly in the terms used by theologians. The personality of God, as it is generally conceived is again a one-dimensional concept based upon man’s small knowledge of his own psychology.

[...] The conventional Christian concept of God has been in many ways a convenient one, and it carries with it many truths. [...]

[...] There is no personal god-individual in Christian terms and yet you do have access to a portion of All That Is, that is highly attuned to you only above all others.

[...] Their idea of one god was not new to them. Many ancient religions held the belief of one god above all others. This god above all others was a far more lenient god, however, than the one the Hebrews followed. [...] And they often referred to, say, the god in the tree, or the spirit in the flower. [...]

The journeys of the gods, therefore, represent the journeys of man’s own consciousness projected outward. [...] Its consciousness, and its reality, is within each man, and within the gods he has created. That last is in small letters, and gods shall always be in small letters. [...]

The Hebrews conceived of an overseer god, an angry and just and sometimes cruel god; and many sects denied, then, the idea that other living beings beside man possessed inner spirits. [...]

(9:45.) The Hebrew god, however, represented a projection of a far different kind. [...] God becomes man’s ally against nature.

[...] Now as long as you expect a god to take on the responsibilities of a god, it seems inconceivable to look inside. [...] As long as you dwell on your own imperfections you accept that god, and it has no meaning in reality. You have created a concept of a god that has no reality. [...]

No god ever created sorrow. All attributes projected on God are your own. [...] No god ever created the environment in which you live. God gave you powers of creativity. [...]

[...] You have made God responsible for all of your (words lost). [...]

[...] And in one of your excursions you came upon the image of a small god, long since forgotten by that civilization, and the god was called “Marumba.” [...]

[...] But each of you are, in your way, to become as gods and accept that awesome responsibility. Now you notice I said to become as gods—and note the plural. [...]

[...] And one of the things that hampers you, what you are afraid of, is very simple: You are afraid that underneath it all you will find the autocratic, cruel, frightening and basically unjust God that lingers in the back of your mind and subconscious. And that despite all your journeys and quests, he will be there to claim you, and that though you try to escape him, that this is the face of the real God that you will find. [...]

[...] I will tell you that the god in the depths of your subconscious mind is a capricious god who brings death and desolation without warning; who is unforgiving, who is indeed in doubt [sic] (endowed?) with male characteristics highly in character. [...]

In a reality that is inconceivably multidimensional, the old concepts of God are relatively meaningless. [...] If I told you that God was an idea, you would not understand what I meant, for you do not understand the dimensions in which an idea has its reality, or the energy that it can originate and propel. You do not believe in ideas in the same way that you believe in physical objects, so if I tell you that God is an idea, you will misinterpret this to mean that God is less than real — nebulous, without reality, without purpose, and without motive action.

God was seen as cruel and powerful when man believed that these were desirable characteristics, needed particularly in his battle for physical survival. He projected these upon his idea of a god because he envied them and feared them. You have cast your idea of god, therefore, in your own image.

[...] You could not but imagine God as a father. It would never have occurred to you to imagine a god in any other than human terms. [...]

[...] This imagined god has therefore changed throughout your centuries, mirroring man’s shifting ideas of himself.

[...] One of the most important points, I think, is that God is not static Himself. [...] Most of your God concepts deal with a static God, and here is one of your main theological difficulties. [...] There is no static God. When you say, ‘This is God,’ then God is already something else. I am using the term ‘God’ for simplicity’s sake.

“The pressure came from two sources: from the conscious but still probable individual selves who found themselves alive in a God’s dream, and from the God who yearned to release them.

“The personality of God as generally conceived is a one-dimensional concept based upon man’s small knowledge of his own psychology. What you prefer to think of as God is, again, an energy gestalt or pyramid consciousness. [...]

[...] What you call God is the sum of all consciousness, and yet the whole is more than the sum of Its parts. God is more than the sum of all personalities, and yet all personalities are what He is.

[...] If God could tell a man to slay a son, and if private revelation were granted validity, then “divinely inspired crimes” might not only be legion, but might also take man’s energies away from accepted Godly pursuits—like fighting the infidels or heretics at home (all louder).

In the past, because of your God concepts, private revelations were indeed highly unwieldy. [...] This applied not only privately, however, but to the mass-accepted revelations of all religions, that could justify righteous wars for God’s sake, or justify murder in the name of peace.

(On September 27, Jane woke up after her nap with a batch of material in mind on: Private Revelation, and the Voice of God, or Divine Dialogues, which she wrote down. [...]

[...] God’s words were not to be taken lightly.

Now: This is a personal god, in your terms. It is a personal god because this god represents the part of that which is, which is yourself, you see. No one else can speak to this particular portion of this god. [...] The part of you that is formed from All That Is, is this god; is aware of all your needs because god is also, in this respect, yourself. [...]

There is what you may call a god, but hardly in terms of which you can conceive. Using your terms, you are indeed a part of this god. [...] You have immediate, instant personal (underlined) connection with this god, using your terms. You are directly connected to this god. You cannot be disconnected because this god is what you are made of.

[...] These can be compared in this context, you see, to minor gods, and your mythologies are full of these. [...]

Take the minor god connection lightly as the term is a poor one but brings out the idea I want to portray, though it is somewhat distorted. [...]

“Thank God that some god managed to disentangle itself from such psychic oneness, if that’s what it’s supposed to be. Thank God that some god loved itself enough to diversify, to create itself in a million different forms; to multiply, to explode its being inward and outward. Thank God that some god loved its own individuality enough to endow the least and the most, the greatest and the smallest, with its own unique being.

“Cherish the gifts of the gods. [...] You are a god living a life — being, desiring, creating. Through honoring yourself, you honor whatever it is God is, and become a conscious co-creator.”

“God knows itself through the flesh. God may know itself through a million or a thousand million other worlds, as so may I — but because this world is, and because I am alive in it, it is more than appearance, more than a shackle to be thrown aside. [...]

Because of the beliefs of religion, the child expected God to show his power through some disastrous act by which sinners would be punished. That child’s life already carries the marks of her beliefs about religion, God, power, and mainly in the belief that nature is a tool in the God’s hands—to be used against man at any time.

[...] She said that she had asked in a prayer for proof of God’s existence. [...] She was convinced that God had answered her prayer thusly.

[...] He knew no Gods were sending down vengeance.

[...] It peopled the world of man with saints, sinners, priests, and it peopled space with a God, a legion of angels, and a devil and his cohorts—so surely Christianity must be based upon fact.

Let me emphasize again that in any terms of which you can conceive of a god, such a god is not static. And as soon as you say, “God is this” or “God is that,” God is already something more. [...] Why do you think you can keep track of your entity or of a god? [...] The gods not only have surprises for you, but you have surprises for the gods and it can be no other way. [...]

[...] And the entity, and even God himself—pyramid gestalts—must be involved in surprise and new creations. [...] Even the gods surprise themselves. [...]

[...] I will use the term “God” because it has meaning to you. “God,” in your terms, is not a static entity, he is not something completed and done with. [...]

[...] And to lose that individuality, my dear friend, would mean that God had lost one of his voices, and that God had become deaf in one way and that one tone was forever lost. [...]

The hard fact, to all intelligent minds, must be that there is no God. The myth insists that a God exists, and the intelligent man finds himself in a dilemma that does not exist for the unintelligent. [...]

The God myth enabled him, man, to give his higher so-called instincts an objectivity, and the God concept represented and still represents a link with the inner self.

[...] As far as hard facts are concerned, there is no God as mankind has envisioned him, and yet God once existed as mankind now envisions him.

The God concept, however, is true and not true. [...]

[...] God, or All That Is, is in the deepest sense completed, and yet uncompleted. [...] All That is, or God, in a certain fashion, now (underlined)—and this is qualified—learns as you learn, and makes adjustments according to your knowledge. [...]

A. God the Father. There’s no way to assign any reasonably accurate date to when God the Father created all things, as described in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. [...]

D. Zeus was the supreme god of the ancient Greeks, who worshipped him in connection with almost every facet of daily life. [...] The Romans identified Zeus with their own supreme god, Jupiter, or Jove.

Now: In the beginning, there was not God the Father, Allah, Zoroaster, Zeus, or Buddha.¹

[...] The gods served, then, as stimulators of development. [...] The god images would change as consciousness did. The various god concepts that have fallen by the wayside, so to speak, represent areas of development that were not chosen, in your terms, but they are still latent. [...]

Dictation: Now: To some extent the development of consciousness as you understand it follows the development of the gods through the ages; and in those stories appear the guises that man might have taken, as well as those that he did.

All animal gods hint of various experiments and species in which consciousness took different forms, in which the birth of egotistical awareness as you know it tried several areas of exploration. [...]

[...] That early rapport, that early mixture, would later be remembered in myths of gods in animal form. [...]

In your terms of time, man has always projected unassimilated psychological elements of his own personality outward, but in much earlier times he did this using a multitudinous variety of images, personifications, gods, goddesses, demons and devils, good spirits and bad. Before the Roman gods were fully formalized, there was a spectacular range of good and bad deities, with all gradations [among them], that more or less “democratically” represented the unknown but sensed, splendid and tumultuous characteristics of the human soul, and have stood for those sensed but unknown glimpses of his own reality that man was in one way or another determined to explore.

[...] Some stood for forces of nature that could very well be at times advantageous, and at times disadvantageous—as, for example, the god of storms might be very welcome at one time, in periods of drought, while his powers might be quite dreaded if he overly satisfied his people. There was no chasm of polarity between the “good gods and the bad ones.”

Jehovah and the Christian version of God brought about a direct conflict between the so-called forces of good and the so-called forces of evil by largely cutting out all of the intermediary gods, and therefore destroying the subtle psychological give-and-take that occurred between them—among them—and polarizing man’s own view of his inner psychological reality.

The supposedly telepathic messages can be attributed to contemporaries—enemies, gods, devils, or what have you. [...]

[...] To be a child of God was to trust in your own worth. [...] The child of God would automatically find salvation, and everyone was a child of God. When Christ said “Believe in me, and you will be saved,” he meant “Believe in your relationship to God, in that you are his son, as I am, and you will surely be saved.” [...]

Now: the message of the Christ entity was, in religious terms “You are all children of God—the ‘sinner’ as well as the saint.” [...]

The Christian concept of heaven with its riches, God and his bounty, the source of nature itself—all of this in our terms was a symbolic structure describing in storybook terms the attributes and characteristics of Framework 2.

[...] Hence he stressed time and time again that each person was a child of God.

[...] The word God embarrasses it beyond measure, simply because the word no longer means what the overly conscientious self was taught to believe what it meant. It was not the Catholic God. It fears the taking of false gods, you see.

[...] The overly conscientious self fears to use the word of God, or the word God. [...] In actuality the overly conscientious self has not been educated, and is deeply terrified that Ruburt is taking false gods.

[...] The overly conscientious self has always seen itself in male terms because of the God concept, of the God being male.

You are part of God in that you are part of the consciousness that is, but you are not apart from a god who looks down on you and speaks... [...] You could call hell a separation from the main stream of consciousness called God, but this is impossible actually...

[...] Your God is part of a larger reality. [...] There is a give and take between you and the stars on a physical basis, just as there is also a connection between selves and what you call a god.

[...] He then threw out the God concept as a question for general discussion. [...]

[...] Bill’s answer included the idea that he believed a god would have to appear to the human race in humanoid form so that we could understand it.)