In the Preface I also wrote about how I thought the great blossomings of religious consciousness and scientific consciousness engendered by the events at Three Mile Island and Jonestown/Iran would continue to grow, once born, seemingly with lives of their own. [...]

1. Since according to Seth something like a basic religious awareness has always been with mankind, Seth here indicates a few historical and mythological signposts of that intuitive understanding.

[...] B.C.) was a Persian religious teacher and prophet.

(When I read her my note at break, dealing with her own reaction to a conventional religious background, she most definitely agreed with it. [...] But the real conflict could be that her early religious conditioning especially forbade her working with her natural abilities to their own specified degrees. [...]

(I was thinking that Seth was on his way to saying that part of Jane’s own trouble was her conscious struggle to go her own way with her unusual abilities, in spite of her early conditioning—religious and otherwise. [...]

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

[...] I am using the name here, Christ, as one person for the sake of discussion, for that entity touched many lives, each leaping into a kind of super-reality as it joyfully played its part in the religious drama.

[...] Again, he spoke in religious terms, for those were the terms of the times. [...]

[...] Darwin was initially a religious man. Like many others, his religious background held out nonsensical propositions. [...]

[...] In that regard, for example, James was quite correct: certain religious societies interpreted the theme so that it read “evolution of the soul”; but there is no soul in Darwinian theory and hereditary, and certainly none in the environment. [...]

[...] Sexual, economic, social and even religious behavior became tinged by these concepts. [...]

The person so involved must be extremely disturbed to begin with: up in arms against social, national, or religious issues, and therefore able to serve as a focus point for countless other individuals affected in the same manner.

In some cases, however, the constructed superbeing can deliver astute comments on national, social, or religious conditions.

Some time earlier, local religious organizations had made plans for a mass revival. Followers of a popular religious group were signed up and some considerable publicity given for the event. [...] It was an attempt on the part of fundamental denominations to solve the problems at another level, through an influx of religious identification, conversion, and enthusiasm.

(12:02.) Many in the religious community said that the flood was the will of God at that level, or that people were being punished for their transgressions. In its own way the flood was a religious event, for it united diverse groups of people — who did not always have the most humanistic of intents — with the community. [...]

PROBABILITIES, THE NATURE OF GOOD AND
EVIL, AND RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM

The chapter heading: “Probabilities, the Nature of Good and Evil, and Religious Symbolism.”

[...] To progress is supposedly to ascend, while the horror of religious punishment, hell, is seen at the bottom of all things.

[...] They seek out leaders — political, scientific (humorously), or religious — who will order their lives for them.

There are religious cults, and there are also scientific ones. [...]

The other heading he gave helps make up the title for the next chapter (6). Add to it: “Religious and Scientific Cults, and Private Paranoias.”

[...] The majority of accepted beliefs — religious, scientific, and cultural — have tended to stress a sense of powerlessness, impotence, and impending doom — a picture in which man and his world is an accidental production with little meaning, isolated yet seemingly ruled by a capricious God. [...]

Religious, scientific, medical, and cultural communications stress the existence of danger, minimize the purpose of the species or of any individual member of it, or see mankind as the one erratic, half-insane member of an otherwise orderly realm of nature. [...]

[...] He definitely does not like the religious connotation, and it is only here that problems arise.... [...]

[...] He had been taught the dire consequences in church terms of losing your soul, and he was afraid of leading people astray whenever religious areas were approached. [...]

[...] Part of this has to do also with the fact that his complete support in St. Vincent’s Catholic orphanage was carried on by a religious order. [...]

In any given historical period, one religious drama may finally emerge as the exterior representation, but there will also be many minor dramas, “projections,” that do not entirely take. [...]

[...] There were, however, a score of men in the same general area, physically, who responded to the inner psychic climate and felt upon themselves the attraction and responsibility of the religious hero.

His rigidity prevented the spontaneity necessary for any true great religious release. [...]

Religious ecstasy does not need physical suffering as a stimulus, and such a means in the overall (underlined) will work against religious understanding. [...]

[...] So they hoped to achieve religious ecstasy.

[...] It was built around a religious ritual. [...] Their rituals were as strict as they are in your church and they were as religious as they followed them. [...]

The cannibals, in one way, were far more discerning, far more religious, and far more sacred in their attitude than many of you here in this room. [...]

(Florence remarked that cannibalism didn’t seem very religious.)

Your religious concepts will change considerably, and the images associated with them. [...] Males ruled both (they still do), and yet those leading religious organizations at least recognized their intuitive base. [...]

(Long pause at 11:07.) Heresy was considered female and subversive because it could threaten to destroy the frameworks set about the acceptable expression of religious fervor. [...]

[...] That one sentence is basically scientific heresy, and in many circles it is religious heresy as well. [...]

[...] There is an old religious hangover here from the Catholic background. [...]

[...] On the other hand Ruburt was spontaneously religious.

[...] On Ruburt’s part the early religious experiences also initiated the deep quest for inner knowledge that is behind all creative endeavor, and that served as an impetus.

[...] Many religious dogmas consider such conditions, again, the result of a god’s punishment. [...]

Over the centuries, in our terms, there have been numerous religious and secular (or worldly or nonreligious) consciousnesses at work and play in the Middle East. [...]

In just that one area on our globe, then, a group of consciousnesses has chosen to “evolve” into a number of religious and secular forces that are both internal and external as far as national borders go. [...]

[...] I began questioning Jane about her religious training in Catholic grade school. [...]

(After our talk about religious questions, I wrote a short note quoting Jane — one that I may use in the note for Dreams — and got her okay on it.)

Your religious ideas have often told you that deformities at birth were the result of the parents’ sins cast upon the children, or that another kind of punishment was involved in terms of “karma.” [...]

The entire idea of reincarnation has been highly distorted by other religious concepts. [...]

Religious authority, when completely exercised, can be disastrous, for it sets up an unyielding set of principles as absolute truth, and any dissension is considered dangerous. (Amused:) With my nearly forgotten experience as a minor pope, I can say I would trust a crooked politician far better than a holy but fanatic religious leader.

That particular authority of state, community, government, is a conglomeration of religious, scientific, and cultural opinions that are taken more or less as fact. [...]