“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We also speculated that Seth might refer to what may be called the “Jonestown Affair,” or something like it. This had erupted in a mass suicide, involving over 400 Americans, in the community of Jonestown in what was formerly British Guyana, in South America. A US congressman was also murdered, along with media network people, etc. The sect, called the People’s Temple, had been created by Jim Jones, a charismatic fundamentalist who had eventually been hounded out of the U.S. for many reasons, to then set up his town for his devoted religious followers in Guyana. The whole thing had a weird unbelievability about it, as Jane and I watched the TV reports and read—and saved – the newspaper accounts.

The message is meant to make all question who call themselves religious people. It is there for (Prime Minister) Begin (of Israel) and (President) Sadat (of Egypt). It is there as an early Christmas present for those who use Christianity in fanatical ways. It is there also for all political leaders.

Your religious leaders have freedom to say what they want to, and they have all of technology’s advances in communications at their service. As per James, when democracy does not work, people look elsewhere. Jones’s followers were the disinherited, the disenchanted, the poor and struggling, yet many of those people were intellectually gifted and felt their promise cut off.

They were bitter—but more. They were frightened. They could not free their native abilities—many, now. Jones seemed to be their key to the establishment. He was the opener of doors. He had his picture taken with celebrities, and because he was “a religious man,” the establishment took it for granted that his aims and policies were good, and that he spoke for those who had no voice otherwise.

[...] The birth of great religious events emerges from the interior religious drama. [...]

[...] He will emerge as an eternal hero in the external religious drama, as the inner self is the eternal hero of the interior religious drama.

[...] Coupled with that, however, she developed a very strong, literal, religious drive on her own. [...]

[...] In such a religious drama however (long pause), the main personality is much more conscious of his inner knowledge, more aware of his abilities, far better able to use them, and exultantly familiar with his relationship to all of life.

Rising ego consciousness then would have its religious reasons for domination and control. [...] The church, however — the Roman Catholic Church — still held a repository of religious ideas and concepts that served as a bank of probabilities from which the race could draw. The religious ideas served as social organization, much needed, and many of the monks managed to preserve old manuscripts and knowledge underground. Those who were allied with religious principles, now, mainly survived, and brought forth communities and descendants who were protected. Psychic and religious ideas, then, despite many drawbacks, served as a method of species organization. [...] Religious concepts from the beginning kept tribes together, provided social structures, and insured physical survival and the protection that made descendants most probable.

(Long pause.) Other democratic societies had existed in the past, but in them democracy was still based on one religious precept, though it might be expressed in different ways — as, for example, in the Greek city-states (in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.). The Holy Roman Empire united a civilization under one religious idea, but the true brotherhood of man can be expressed only by allowing the freedom of man’s thought under the banner of cooperation; and only this will result in the fulfillment of the species, with developments of consciousness that in your terms were latent from the beginning.

[...] Jane and I also liked the idea that from their earliest times, religious forces had been operating in the development of the species; this seemed to be a very sensible concept — and quite obvious once it was mentioned.

[...] Religious incentives always served to stimulate man’s spatial curiosity (intently).⁶

[...] The nunneries and monasteries were long-time social and religious institutions, some extremely rigorous, while others were religiously oriented in name only. [...]

The church was quite real to Ruburt as a child, through the priests who came [to the house] regularly, through direct contact with the religious [grade] school, and the support offered to the family. [...] Many of those fears originated long before the sessions, of course, and before he realized that there was any alternative at all between, say, conventional religious beliefs and complete disbelief in any nature of divinity. [...]

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 medieval times to be excommunicated was no trivial incident, but an event harkening severance that touched the soul, the body, and all political, religious and economic conditions by which the two were tied together. [...]

[...] The earlier religious scene suggests that I was appalled to find my abilities leading me anywhere within the realm of religious ideas at all to start with. [...]

[...] I had come into a room to find some kind of religious talk going on, people in folding chairs; I’m rather surprised. [...]

[...] As given, those involve the cultural training and religious indoctrinations. [...]

The prayer can be of great help, because it is religiously couched, and yet carries a new, not old, message of beliefs.

They were not only his private religious beliefs, but those of his contemporaries generally—(louder:) and the foundations upon which your present civilization was made. [...]

(I reminded Jane that since she belonged to no religion now [having left the Roman Catholic Church when she was 19 years old], her mystical nature would choose other avenues of expression than religious ones; as in these sessions, for instance. Perhaps, I suggested, it would turn out that one of her main endeavors would be to enlarge the boundaries of “ordinary” mystical experience itself, to show it operating outside of accepted religious frameworks. I added that within those religious boundaries, mystics across the centuries and throughout the world have given voice to the same ideas in almost the same words, and that as an “independent” mystic Jane was in a position to approach the situation from a freer; more individual standpoint: She would be able to add fresh insights to what is certainly one of the species’ all-pervasive, unifying states. [...]

(She hasn’t undergone a classical religious conversion of the kind William James describes in his The Varieties of Religious Experience,⁴ yet more than once she’s known her own forms of ecstasy, or deep alteration of consciousness, or illumination — whatever one chooses to call such states. [...]

[...] Most of them had functioned within religious frameworks, and Jane and I saw how their various environments had given color and shape to their transcendent experiences. [...]

(Even so, through her school years Jane didn’t particularly talk about her thoughts, or the abilities she sensed within herself — not with her mother, the priests she came to know well [and who didn’t approve in any case if she carried her religious devotion, her mysticism, “too far”], or even with her grandfather. [...]

(Today we read a long treatise on the “truths” advocated by “holy men” associated with various Eastern religious philosophies — Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and so forth. [...]

(Being individualists, then, as I wrote in the Introductory Notes for Volume 1, we don’t concentrate upon whatever parallels exist between Seth’s concepts on the one hand and those of Eastern religious, philosophical, and mystical doctrines on the other; while we know of such similarities, we’re just as aware of how different from them Seth’s viewpoint can be, too. [...]

2. From any of Seth’s books — let alone Jane’s — I could cite a number of comments that question much of the thinking behind different Eastern systems of religious thought. [...]

[...] We could easily take a book to present the reasons for our particular beliefs, examining them in connection with both Eastern and Western religious philosophies. [...]

The exterior religious dramas are of course imperfect representations of the ever-unfolding interior spiritual realities. The various personages, the gods and prophets within religious history — these absorb the mass inner projections thrown out by those inhabiting a given time span.

Such religious dramas focus, direct, and, hopefully, clarify aspects of inner reality that need to be physically represented. [...]

Exterior religious dramas are important and valuable only to the extent that they faithfully reflect the nature of inner, private spiritual existence. [...]

[...] The forbidden experiences will simply be unconsciously expressed, gather strength and vitality, and rise up to form a counter projection which will then form another, newer exterior religious drama.

[...] Many people are involved, however, with various religious ideas and philosophies, whose effects are quite unfortunate in personal experience. [...]

It is unfortunately often — but not always — true that individuals who carry strong religious feeling are often bothered more than usual by poor health and personal dilemmas. [...]

[...] Obviously I am speaking here of scientific dogma, but such dogma is far more religious than scientific, for it also expects to be believed without proof, on faith alone.

With some variations, the same kind of “sudden conversion” can occur when a person who has berated religious concepts and beliefs suddenly does a double-take of a different kind, ending up as a twice-born Christian.

If the hassles surrounding TMI have engendered forces of a scientifically oriented consciousness, then, certainly those in Iran have released a very strong religiously oriented consciousness. Religious drives of whatever nature are much more comprehensible to us than scientific ones: I think it quite safe to note that in ordinary terms our species began struggling with religious expression long before it began recording history. [...] Iran’s religious leaders actually run the country now, operating behind a weak secular and probably temporary government appointed by its Western-leaning and departed leader before he fled his country last January. [...]

[...] Horrendous as the situation at Jonestown turned out to be, with religious fanaticism furnishing a framework for all of those deaths, I think it obvious that developments in Iran are already far more serious. [...] Iran can “infect” other nations or peoples with an ancient religious force, or consciousness, if allowed to do so. [...] To me the religious correlations are obvious.

[...] Iran is undergoing a revolution of a strongly religious, fundamentalist-Islamic character. [Islam means “peace,” by the way.] The force of Iran’s upheaval makes the growing Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States seem tame indeed by comparison; therefore I want to concentrate upon the Iranian dilemma rather than the religious conflicts in our own country.

In Mass Events, along with TMI Seth had discussed the tragedy of Jonestown—where in November 1978 over 900 Americans had died [by murder or suicide] for a religious cause in faraway Guyana, South America. Last night I realized that in these notes for Dreams I also wanted to refer to the religious revolution in Iran while reminding the reader of the events in Jonestown. [...]

These ideas become the driving themes of these religious dramas of which I have spoken. [...] In any given historic religious drama, therefore, the actors may have already appeared on the historic scene in your past, the prophet of today being the traitor of the past drama.

Ideas of good and evil, gods and devils, salvation and damnation, are merely symbols of deeper religious values; cosmic values if you will, that cannot be translated into physical terms.

[...] Obviously, then, beyond these earthly historic religious dramas, the seemingly recurring tales of gods and men, there are spiritual realities.

For example, the main character in a religious historical drama may or may not consciously be aware of the ways in which such information is given to him. [...]

[...] It has so many variations now in the world culture that it allows many individuals to move from one belief system to another while still safely cloaked in religious garb. If you move from sinner to saint or saint to sinner, from Buddhism to fundamentalism of the Christian kind, or from one sect to another, seemingly with a diverse belief system, your growth and transformations are still being provided for by a religious structure.

[...] For centuries Christianity served to preserve old frameworks while still allowing for transforming elements and symbolic activities that allowed individuals to assert some independence and originality by moving from one religious symbol, say, to another—still, however, within that larger framework. [...]

[...] Individuals born into your time do not feel, say, the same sense of familiarity with the religious belief systems of past lives. [...]

(Long pause.) Those creative elements of personality must then to some extent or another finally communicate with the “Sinful Self” directly—sympathetically embrace that self (pause) as the part of personality that first accepted cultural and religious beliefs with all of their negative and positive influences. [...]

[Ray] Bradbury’s stories, for example, are actually tales of a religious moralist. When you fear that man will most certainly destroy himself through his misuse of technologies, then you are expressing the same feeling in different form expressed by the religious attitude—only religion’s devils are turned into technological devices. [...]

[...] He did poorly in science in college, for that matter, for if his mind was too scientific for religious dogma, it was too creative and emotional for conventional scientific thought. [...]

(Long pause at 9:02.) The Sinful Self shows itself in a period of transition from its religious to scientific format in science fiction or fantasy in particular, where you can almost trace the translation of religion’s self, tainted by original sin, to the Darwinian and Freudian concepts of the flawed self, bound to destruction one way or another, propelled by the unbridled unconscious or evolutionary defect. [...]

[...] Its expression directly contradicted first religious then scientific precepts. [...]

[...] Many individuals cannot unify the various areas of their belief and feeling, and at Christmas they partially recognize the vast gulf that exists between their scientific beliefs and their religious beliefs. [...] A psychic depression often results, one that is deepened by the Christmas music and the commercial displays, by the religious reminders that the species is made in God’s image, and by the other reminders that the body so given is seemingly incapable of caring for itself and is a natural prey to disease and disaster.

I am speaking now of religions so intertwined with social life and community ventures that all sense of basic religious integrity becomes lost. Man is by nature a religious creature.

Dictation: One of man’s strongest attributes is religious feeling. [...] There is a natural religious knowledge with which you are born. [...]

[...] Those beliefs do not exist alone, but are of course intertwined with religious and scientific ones, as separate as they might appear. [...]

[...] Since Marian is a deeply religious person also, Seth tied his ideas on positive thinking and suggestion in with the religious theme, stressing the positive use of faith. [...]

(Should she not be able to master the use of suggestion and positive religious faith quickly enough, Seth reassured Marian that the operation would then take care of the tumor, and that Marian had no worries here. [...]

[...] Some moral philosophers, medical geneticists, physicians, lawyers, and religious leaders believe that those who carry genes for serious genetic diseases do not have the right to reproduce. [...] Questions abound involving amniocentesis (examination of the fluid in the womb to detect genetic defects in the fetus); therapeutic abortion; artificial insemination; reproduction by in vitro fertilization; embryo transfer (surrogate motherhood); the responsibilities of the legal, medical and religious communities; whether mentally retarded, genetically defective people should receive life-prolonging medical treatment, and so forth. [...]

[...] The world’s view was a religious one, specified by the church, and its word was truth and fact at the same time.

[...] Suffering sent by God was considered a fact of life, then, and a religious truth as well.

[...] In man’s history there have been all kinds of incantations, meant to mollify the evil spirits that man believed were real in fact and in religious truth.

[...] (Pause.) The religious area is tricky, because it contains high potentials for his development, and also sore points, you see. [...] If he feels he is on trial in the religious area, then this has negative connotations.

[...] You see, he is really working in new religious frontiers. [...]

Many of the elements of his religious background have been creatively used and built upon, and this involves the complete transformation of potent, unconscious material, from potentially destructive to creative centers.

[...] Yet all of his religious background gave him an immersion in a strong organized religion. [...]

[...] Private lives have merged with public sentiment and religious fervor. [...] 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.”

All of those religious and political structures that you certainly recognize as valid, arising from the “event” of Christ’s ascension, existed — and do exist — because of an idea. [...]

[...] The old religious myths fit a different kind of people, however, and lasted for as many centuries in the past as Christianity has reached into the future.² The miraculous merging of imagination with historical time, however, became less and less synchronized, so that only r-i-t-e-s (spelled) remained and the old gods seized the imagination no longer. [...]

[...] It is instead a fanatical Puritan vein, peculiarly American in character, and restrictive rather than expansive, for the bursts of emotion are highly structured — that is, the emotions are limited in most areas of life, permitted only an explosive religious expression under certain conditions, when they are not so much spontaneously expressed as suddenly released from the dam of usual repression.

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.

[...] Psychological reality, for all of the religious (pause) dangers placed upon it, was anything but a flat-surfaced experience. [...]

Even your poor misguided moral/religious organization is saying in its fashion to the scientifically-oriented society: “How is faith not real, then? [...]