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Seth on Christ’s Message

The message of the Christ entity was, in religious terms, “You are all children of God—the ‘sinner’ as well as the saint.”* Indeed, according to the original Christ thesis, while a man could sin, no man was identified as a sinner. He was not identified with his failures or limitations, but instead with his potential.

* Here’s an interesting example of potential ambiguity in writing, which makes the sharing of ideas challenging sometimes. When Christ says: “You are all children of God—the ‘sinner’ as well as the saint.” Is he referring to us as being sinners or saints, one or the other, or is he referring to us as being both sinners and saints at the same time? I think Christ meant that we’re all sinners and saints at the same time, to one degree or another. How did you interpret his meaning the first time you read this sentence?

The Christ entity knew the vitality, power, and strength of myths. That vitality allows for different readings, of course, and through man’s changing development he reads his myths differently, yet they serve as containers for intuitional knowledge.

Christ’s thesis was inserted into a Jewish tradition dealing deeply with guilt, and the new thesis was meant to temper that tradition, and to spread beyond it. Instead, while carrying the belief in man’s potential, Christianity smothered the thesis beneath a slag heap of old guilt.

Guilt can be used to manipulate people, of course, and it is a fine tool in the hands of government, religion, science, or any large organization that wants to retain its power.

Christ dealt with myths, once again-potent ones that stood for inner realities. Christ clothed those realities in colorful stories geared to people’s understanding. 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.

The message was “Do not condemn yourself or others,” for Christ well knew that self-righteous condemnation of the self or of one’s neighbors served to darken the door through which man might view his own potential and its greater source.

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 (described below – Pete).

In our terms, All That Is exists in Framework 2 as elsewhere, but Framework 2 represents the source of known physical reality. From it flow all of the known facts of your world. Christ hoped to show that you survived death psychically and spiritually – that you returned to the father in heaven.

Literal minds, looking for evidential proof, would insist that the physical body itself must rise, ascending, hence the related stories (and) the misinterpretation of data.

“Ask, and you shall receive.” Christ well knew that that statement was indeed true, but men who condemned themselves, who considered themselves sinners, would not know what to ask for, except punishment to relieve their guilt. Hence he stressed time and time again that each person was a child of God.

He also stressed the importance of a childlike belief, knowing that the adult mind was apt to question “How, and when, and in what manner can my request be granted?”

The words “Let thy will be done,” represented excellent psychological understanding, for according to Christ’s teachings as originally given, God the father represented the source or parent of the self, who was by nature free from the self’s ignorance or lack of understanding at any given time, and who would know better than the known self those experiences that would fulfill the self’s hopes, dreams, and potentials.

In this way, with the words spoken “Let thy will be done,” the self could free itself from its own misconceptions, and attract from Framework 2 benefits that it might otherwise not be knowledgeable enough to request.

A portion of each person dwells in Framework 1 and Framework 2. Understand that Framework 2 is a psychic or spiritual or mental structure. In deepest terms, of course, it is not a place. It is, if you prefer, a spiritual landscape of far greater resources than the one you know. It brings forth the world of your experience in that world, and so it is your source also. “Let thy will be done” meant “Let me follow those greater dictates of my inner nature.” Even with all of the distortions, that formula worked for centuries in large measure. The God, the source, was put outside of nature, however, finally becoming at last too remote, and the story itself became frayed at the edges as man tried to tie intuitive truths to objective fact.

To be a child of God was to trust in your own worth. You could admit failings, transgressions of one kind or another without identifying yourself, say, with failure. 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.” Again, he spoke in religious terms, for those were the terms of the times.

This knowledge, however, of the innate goodness of the self literally gives the individual the inner support necessary for the exercise of man’s fullest potentials. In civil and governmental terms, such a policy could not be tolerated nor has man yet learned how to deal with that basic principal. It is almost automatic, for example, to label a man a murderer, and identify him with his crime. The society never came to terms with the vast implications inherent in Christ’s teachings, and so it abandoned them.

Man’s great exuberant spontaneity has never been allowed its full sweep as a result.

You (Jane Roberts and Robert Butts) both chafed against the belief of your times, that man was a natural aggressor, tainted from birth, that he was damned by his very nature, condemned by his early childhood background, by original sin, or by his genes. At the same time, you were also tainted by those beliefs, and seemed to see evidence for them whenever you looked into your selves, or outward to the world of your fellows.

Each person carried the brunt of that self-condemnation. Ruburt (Jane’s larger male identity) is hardly outstanding in having physical difficulties, and overall your lives and the work speak for more of the potential of personality than of personality’s lacks. You set for yourselves a goal of shoving aside all of the beliefs and distortions for yourselves and for others.

You went beyond your family’s beliefs individually, searching for yourselves and trying various roads. You accomplished the quite difficult feat, in certain terms, of finding each other, so that you each had a mate who would aid you in your pursuits—and you tried as best you knew to encourage each other. You were still plagued by remnants of self-disapproval and self-condemnation, however, yet the spontaneous self in each of you managed to push here and there and blaze forth whenever you gave it a chance, with some quite outstanding results.

I always have to couch my material for you personally, just ahead of where you are at any given time. Overall, however, the main thrust of the material of course has always been way ahead of where you are, practically speaking, at any given time.

In terms of your lives, you are able to use certain portions of the material at different times. No one could put it all into working order at once in a given life. Ruburt [Jane] then used and enjoyed his spontaneity, and has been developing it along the lines of his understanding. It is not, as it may seem, that he had something of spontaneity and lost it.

Spontaneity knows its own order, and freely comes into order. Years ago, before the psychic experience, he was not for example psychically spontaneous to any great degree. He used his writing to hold back and yet contain his innate psychic knowledge. He disapproved of his own dancing, sometimes even of his sexual yearnings. Now those disapprovals simply piled up, with resulting physical difficulties. He would through the years begin to approve of spontaneity in one more area – spontaneity in class [Jane’s Seth class], for example – or with Sumari poetry, or in finally approving his own psychic writings. The disapproval was still present, however; yet now and then through the years would come a period of release, of sudden ease and sudden physical improvement—each time when he suspended self-disapproval, and when for your reasons, you began to suspend your own.

The situation and the faith that you managed to build up in Framework 2 have come to your aid.

The “ommm” exercises and the rune exercises are showing results because some of the material has come through again to you from the sessions, and you are jointly suspending your self-disapproval. In religious terms, you would realize you were saved, or a child of God. You have stopped to a degree identifying yourselves with any limitations. When this happens you actually symbolically say “Let thy will be done,” meaning “Let my greater nature, my spontaneous nature, flow through me without impediment, and without quibbling.”

Then the benefits from Framework 2 can begin to flow without impediment. The body can right itself, and the methods that you use, work. Do you want to rest your hand? [As Seth speaks through Jane, Rob records the sessions by hand. – Pete]

(No, I’m okay.)

Ruburt’s eyes are definitely improving these last few days, as the strain is being relieved from the rest of the body – the neck area particularly, the jaws and muscles of the brow. Nearly all eye difficulties are related to other stresses in the body.

(I should have asked Seth what he meant by “nearly”.)

Ruburt is quite correct: his vision has fluctuated through the years, and in periods of mental ease, understanding, and physical improvements, his vision also improves. You both became extremely depressed, thinking in time terms and concentrating upon past failures with which you identified. The notes Ruburt wrote yesterday are extremely important, with their emphasis upon my old the spontaneous self is the guardian, and added to that, from which your very life springs.

You can will your spontaneity to express itself, even as you can will it not to. Tell Ruburt that if he continues in this manner, and if the two of you can manage to maintain your peace of mind long enough—over a two or three day period, for example, then you can expect rewards in all areas. The inner keys have been turned once again.”

(Seth’s material here on the use of the will came about, I think, as a result of some older material I gave Jane to read this afternoon. It concerned the amazing powers of her will, and is from Session 713,  The “Unknown” Reality Volume 2. This happens to be the session in that book that I’m working on now. I recommend that it be kept in mind and referred to every so often, for it certainly contains many clues to individual capacities. – Robert Butts)

Now, I bid you a fond and encouraging good evening.

(May I ask a question?)

You may.

(This is off the subject, but your material about Christ reminded me of a letter we received from a young woman not long ago. She wanted to know what really happened to Christ, if he wasn’t crucified)

Give us a moment…

That question in the larger context is very difficult to answer. (Eyes closed) There were several men who, together, performed the exploits reported in the Christ story—exploits occurring only roughly in the 33-year period given (for Christ’s life).

A man was crucified, but he was not one who made up the Christ entity. You understand from stories that have come to you the elaborations and half-truths that people can be convinced are true. None of the men who made up that entity were crucified. They each died—one I believe in India.

People do not understand that their dreams become reality, and that the greater dramas of history and myth often bear little resemblance to the actual occurrences, but are greater than the physical events.

End of session.

(With loud good humor) You will get bits and tidbits on that now and then.

(Okay, thank you, Seth)

(See Chapter 21 of Seth Speaks for more on the Christ entity. According to history, Christ was crucified, and the other two members of Seth’s Christ entity, John the Baptist and St. Paul, were beheaded. Seth hasn’t mentioned India before in connection with any of the three, so that information is new. It would be interesting to get more data on the whole Christ question. As I told Jane after the session, Seth’s Christ material tonight reminded me of the idea of the Christ book, which Seth mentioned in Personal Reality. – Robert Butts)

From Deleted Session, January 9, 1978 by Jane Roberts and Robert F. Butts.

Republished with permission from current Seth Material copyright holder, Laurel Davies-Butts.


Pete – https://realtalkworld.com

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