“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Ultimately a completed or finished God, or All That Is, would end up smothering His creation. [...]

(9:48.) Illness and suffering are not thrust upon you by God, or by All That Is, or by an outside agency. [...]

alone, but God bless your

[...] The universe and all planes and universes of existence, come indeed from what you may call energy, vitality, idea; or despite Ruburt’s stubborn blocking, from a personality essence or psychic gestalt which you may refer to as God if you prefer. [...]

(See the 81st session and the material on the God concept. [...]

[...] I must however substitute the word God for energy, but still say that energy always was and always will be.

We will now come to one main attribute then of all reality, and of that that is as ultimate as anything I know—that energy gestalt which may be called God.

[...] If you hold them you will feel that those characteristics are given by God. [...]

[...] They will consider poverty as a sign of God’s displeasure and so be inclined to leave the entire matter in his “hands.” [...]

[...] If the first system of beliefs sees money and goods as a sign of God’s blessing, the second group views material possessions as evidence of spiritual decay.

Nightly adventure: Last PM we ask German couple from Big Flats over, the woman mentioned in God of Jane, decide we should change the pace from intense sessions, etc. [...]

[...] He will finish his book (God of Jane), and do beautifully with it. [...]

(Ironically, Charles Darwin’s natural selection, “the survival of the fittest,” [a phrase that Darwin himself did not originate, by the way], allows for all sorts of pain and suffering in the process — the same unhappy facts of life, in Darwin’s view, that finally turned him into an agnostic, away from a God who could allow such things to exist! As I interpret what I’ve read, Darwin didn’t deny the existence of a god of some kind, but he wanted one that would abolish what he saw as the “upward” struggle for existence. [...] Darwin came to believe that he asked the impossible of God. [...] For Darwin and his followers — even those of today, then — nature’s effects gave the appearance of design or plan in the universe without necessitating a belief in a designer or a god; although, as I wrote in Note 7, from the scientific standpoint this belief leaves untouched the question of design in nonliving matter, which is vastly more abundant in the “objective” universe than is living matter, and had to precede that living matter.

[...] The species’ religious drives have been around a lot longer than its scientific ones, however, so I found myself looking for broad correlations between the two, in that under each value system the individual carries a very conscious sense of personal vulnerability. Before Darwinism, to use that concept as an example, man at least felt that God had put him on earth for certain purposes, no matter how much man distorted those purposes through ignorance and war. [...] He was taught — he taught himself — that ideas of souls and gods were ridiculous. [...]

20. I remind the reader that an agnostic (as I think Charles Darwin was) is one who believes the mind can know only physical phenomena, and not whether there are final realities, causes, or gods. An atheist believes there is no God.

(I think it more than a coincidence that in these excerpts from Seth Speaks, Seth mentions Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Biblical story of creation in the same sentence, for those systems of belief represent the two poles of the controversy over origins in our modern Western societies: the strictly Darwinistic, mechanistic view of evolution, in which the weakest of any species are ruthlessly eliminated through natural, predatory selection, and the views of the creationists, who hold that God made the earth and all of its creatures just as described in the Bible.

[...] As that me, I had this emotional gratitude: thank God; at last, someone who can really help—or something like that; I think though I’m not sure that I also meant... [...]

[...] She made a lot of grunting and heavy breathing noises: “Oh God, Bob....” [...]

[...] “Oh, God....” [...]

The gift brings a responsibility, and many of you are tempted to congratulate yourselves on the successes of your lives, and blame God, fate, and society for your failures. In like manner, mankind has a tendency to project his own guilt and his own errors upon a father-god image, who it seems must grow weary of so many complaints.

I speak to those who believe in a god, and those who do not, to those who believe that science will find all answers as to the nature of reality, and to those who do not. [...]

[...] There is (word lost), there is knowledge and in all ancient things there are beginnings before births, there are images before thoughts, there are gods within gods, there are paths that you (words lost). [...]

(To Arnold) And you have closed your mind to your own role, but we will get to it as far as our African god is concerned. [...]

[...] Even then the question arises of public response to trance messages when they contradict official thought—and your questions about how the material might be misused as you explained in God of Jane very well, and—How “responsible” is the conscious mind for trance messages?—How responsible are you for Seth’s messages? [...]

[...] If the information seemed to be coming initially from their God, for example, they continued to think in their particular way about God, even though the experience and the information given should have brought them far beyond such a point.

The going-ahead involved him (long pause) with my ideas of the god concept. [...]

[...] I did realize yesterday that the body’s natural “God given”! [...]

[...] Problems were sent by God as punishment or warning. [...]

[...] The church provided a cosmic drama in which even the life of the sinner had value, even if only to show God’s compassion. [...]

When God went out the window for large masses of people, fate took His place (long pause), and volition also became eroded.

(Pause.) It was in many respects a new world, for it was the first one in which large portions of humanity believed that they were isolated from nature and God, and in which no grandeur was acknowledged as a characteristic of the soul. [...]

As if manufacturing tiny, intensely personal counterparts to those large events, Jane and I finished checking the proofs for God of Jane; she resumed work on her essays, and some new poetry, for If We Live Again; I painted, answered a lot of mail, and helped her continue our private sessions. [...] On that same day back went God of Jane to the publisher, for the last time.

[...] That same day, I congratulated her when our first published copy of God of Jane reached us; that excellent book had followed Mass Events all the way through the publishing process. I told Jane that God of Jane is her best book yet, and that I hope it does well in the marketplace.¹⁵ Yet I sadly noticed that the book’s appearance led to another intensification of her symptoms—the same reaction she’d had when we received our first copy of Mass Events 25 days ago. [...]

“Finish checking copy-edited manuscript of God of Jane this afternoon. [...] Now I see how much impulses are conducive … to just typing, for God’s sake; imagine typing and seeing with ease, just thinking about what I’m thinking about, instead of trying to get my fingers on the proper keys. [...]

[...] On the same day I returned them to Prentice-Hall, I also sent in Jane’s signed contract for If We Live Again—and the mail brought us the copy-edited manuscript for God of Jane.

(Speaking of Prentice-Hall, today Jane received her first copy of God of Jane—a handsome-looking volume that I hope does well as the years pass. [...]

[...] I also said that I thought the publication of God of Jane at last had served as a stimulus for the changes. [...]

(So as we waited for the session I told Jane that I didn’t know which to ask Seth to talk about—my question from last session, or the arrival of God of Jane and her new physical changes.)

(During that same month in 1973 Jane wrote Apprentice Gods, a long poem that’s included in Chapter 16 of Adventures in Consciousness. In the poem she probed for the origins of our personified gods, and referred to counterparts as follows:

… for how like us these earth gods are,

A little investigation gave us glimpses into numerous instances in which blended masculine and feminine qualities are contained in the gods of our very ancient myths. [...]

9. It’s interesting to see how Jane’s Apprentice Gods echoes and enlarges upon the following lines from another long, but quite youthful and dramatic poem that she wrote in 1949, when she was 19 years old:

[...] After we talked for a few minutes, she added: “My God, I’ve got Chapter Two. [...]

(In the notes preceding the last session I wrote that Jane was to call Tam about the date of publication for Mass Events and God of Jane. [...] The expected call came as I finished reading to Jane at breakfast time—but it wasn’t from Tam: Ethel Waters apologized for the fact that now Mass Events has been delayed until May 19, or just possibly only May 4. Mass Events and God of Jane are now due to be published in the same month. [...]

(10:22.) It was in Mass Events and God of Jane that the usual concept of the Sinful Self was most directly and vigorously addressed, and in which the value of individual impulses was stressed with consistent vigor. [...]