Probabilities, The Nature of Good and Evil, and Religious Symbolism

Seth Speaks, Session 568

Probabilities, The Nature of Good and Evil, and Religious Symbolism

Christian dogma speaks of the ascension of Christ, implying of course a vertical ascent into the heavens, and the development of the soul is often discussed in terms of direction.  To progress is supposedly to ascend, while the horror of religious punishment, hell, is seen at the bottom of all things.

Development is therefore considered in a one-line direction only, in Christian terms.  Seldom, for example, is it thought of in horizontal terms.  The idea of evolution in its popular meaning promulgated this theory, as through gradual progression in a one-line direction, man emerged from the ape.  Christ could just as well have disappeared sideways.

The inner reality of the message was told in terms that man at the time could understand, in line with his root assumptions.  Development unfolds in all directions.  The soul is not ascending a series of stairs, each one representing a new and higher point of development.

Instead, the soul stands at the center of itself, exploring, extending its capacities in all directions at once, involved in issues of creativity, each one highly legitimate.  The probable system of reality opens up the nature of the soul to you.  It should change current religion’s ideas considerably.  For this reason, the nature of good and evil is a highly important point.

On the one hand, quite simply and in a way that you cannot presently understand, evil does not exist.  However, you are obviously confronted with what seem to be quite evil effects.  Now it has been said often that there is a god, so there must be a devil – or if there is good, there must be evil.  This is like saying that because an apple has a top, it must have a bottom – but without any understanding of the fact that both are a portion of the apple.

We go back to our fundamentals: You create reality through your feelings, thoughts, and mental actions.  Some of these are physically materialized, others are actualized in probable systems.  You are presented with an endless series of choices, it seems, at any point, some more or less favorable than others.

You must understand that each mental act is a reality for which you are responsible.  That is what you are in this particular system of reality for.  As long as you believe in a devil, for example, you will create one that is real enough for you, and for the others who continue to create him.

Because of the energy he is given by others, he will have a certain consciousness of his own, but such a mock devil has no power or reality to those who do not believe in his existence, and who do not give him energy through their belief.  He is, in other words, a superlative hallucination.  As mentioned earlier, those who believe in a hell and assign themselves to it through their belief can indeed experience one, but certainly in nothing like eternal terms. No soul is forever ignorant.

Now those who have such beliefs actually lack a necessary deep trust in the nature of consciousness, of the soul, and of All That Is.  They concentrate upon not what they think of as the power of good, but fearfully upon what they think of as the power of evil.

The hallucination is created, therefore, out of fear and of restriction.  The devil idea is merely the mass projection of certain fears – mass in that it is produced by many people, but also limited in that there have always been those who rejected this principle.

Some very old religions understood the hallucinatory nature of the devil concept, but even in Egyptian times, the simpler and more distorted ideas became prevalent, particularly with the masses of people.  In some ways, men in those times could not understand the concept of a god without the concept of a devil.

Storms, for example, are highly creative natural events, though they can also cause destruction.  Early man could see only the destruction.  Some intuitively understood that any effects are creative, despite their appearances, but few could convince their fellow men.

The light-and-darkness contrast presents us with the same kind of picture.  The good was seen as light, for men felt safer in the day.  The evil was therefore assigned to nightfall.  Within the mass of distortions, however, hidden beneath the dogma there was always a hint of the basic creativity of every effect.

There are, then, no devils waiting to carry anyone off, unless you create them yourself, in which case the power resides in you and not in the mock devils.  The Crucifixion and attendant drama made sense within your reality at the time.  It arose into the world of physical actuality out of the inner reality from which your deepest intuitions and insights also spring.

The race brought forth the events, then, that would best convey in physical terms this deeper nonphysical knowledge of the indestructibility of the soul.  This particular drama would not have made sense to other systems with different root assumptions than your own.

The symbolism of ascent or descent, or of light and dark, would be meaningless to other realities with different perceptive mechanisms.  While your religions are built around an enduring kernel of truth, the symbolism used was craftily selected by the inner self in line with its knowledge of those root assumptions you hold as valid in the physical universe.  Other information, in dreams for example, will also be given to you with the same symbolism, generally speaking.  The symbolism itself, however, was simply used by the inner self.  It does not inherently belong to the inner reality.

Many probable systems have perceptive mechanisms far different from your own.  In fact, some are based upon gestalts of awareness completely alien to you.  Quite without realizing it, your ego is a result of group consciousness, for example; the one consciousness that most directly faces the exterior world, is dependent upon the minute consciousness that resides within each living cell of your body; and as a rule you are only aware of one ego – at least at a time.

In some systems the “individual” is quite aware of having more egos than one, in your terms.  The entire psychological organization is in a way richer than your own.  A Christ who was not aware of this would not appear in such a system, you see.  There are kinds of perception with which you are not familiar, worlds in which your idea of light does not exist, where almost infinite gradations of thermal qualities are absorbed in terms of sensation, not of light.

In any of these worlds, the Christ drama could never appear as it appeared within your own.  Now the same thing applies to each of your great religions, though as I have said in the past, the Buddhists come closer, generally speaking, to a description of the nature of reality.  They have not understood the eternal validity of the soul, however, in terms of its exquisite invulnerability, nor been able to hold a feeling for its unique character.  But Buddha, like Christ, interpreted what he almost knew in terms of your own reality.  Not only of your own physical reality, but your own probable physical reality.

The methods, the secret methods behind all of the religions, were meant to lead man into a realm of understanding that existed apart from the symbols and the stories, into inner realizations that would take him both within and without the physical world that he knew.  There are many manuscripts still not discovered, from old monasteries particularly in Spain, that tell of underground groups within religious orders who kept these secrets alive when other monks were copying Latin manuscripts.

There were tribes who never learned to write in Africa and Australia who knew these secrets, and men called “Speakers” who memorized them and spread them upward, even throughout northern portions of Europe, before the time of Christ.

(“Could you give a copy of one of those Speaker manuscripts in dictation?”)

It is possible, and would take much time and excellent circumstances.

(“Well, naturally I’d like to see it sometime.”)

Offhand, the work involved could take five years, for there were several versions, and a group of leaders, each going in different directions, who taught their people.  The world was far more ripe for Christianity than people suppose, because of these groups.  The ideas were “buried” already throughout Europe.

Many important concepts were lost, however.  The emphasis was on practical methods of living – quite simply – rules that could be understood, but the reasons for them were forgotten.

The Druids obtained some of their concepts from Speakers.  So did the Egyptians.  The Speakers predated the emergence of any religions that you know, and the religions of the Speakers arose spontaneously in many scattered areas, then grew like wildfire from the heart of Africa and Australia.  There was one separate group in an area where the Aztecs dwelled at a later date, though the land mass was somewhat different then, and some of the lower cave dwellings at times were under water.

Various bands of the Speakers continued through the centuries.  Because they were trained so well, the messages retained their authenticity.  They believed, however, that it was wrong to set words into written form, and so did not record them.  They also used natural earth symbols, but clearly understood the reason for this.  The Speakers, singly, existed in your Stone Age period, and were leaders.  Their abilities helped the cavemen survive.  There was little physical communication, however, in those days between the various Speakers, and some were unaware of the existence of the others.

Their message was as “pure” and undistorted as possible.  It was for this reason however, through the centuries, that many who heard it translated it into parables and tales.  Now, strong portions of Jewish scriptures carry traces of the message of these early Speakers, but even here, distortions have hidden the messages.

Since consciousness forms matter, and not the other way around, then thought exists before the brain and after it.  A child can think coherently before he learns vocabulary – but he cannot impress the physical universe in its terms.  So this inner knowledge has always been available, but is to become physically manifest – literally made flesh.  The Speakers were the first to impress this inner knowledge upon the physical system, to make it physically known.  Sometimes only one or two Speakers were alive in several centuries.  Sometimes there were many.  They looked around them and knew that the world sprang from their interior reality.  They told others.  They knew that the seemingly solid natural objects about them were composed of many minute consciousnesses.

They realized that from their own creativity they formed idea into matter, and that the stuff of matter was itself conscious and alive.  They were intimately familiar with the natural rapport existing between themselves and their environment, therefore, and knew that they could alter their environment through their own acts.