Seth, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Session 829, MARCH 22, 1978Now: The animals do have imagination, regardless of your current thought. Yet man is so gifted that he directs his experience and forms his civilizations largely through the use of his imaginative abilities.
You do not understand this point clearly at all, but your social organizations, your governments—these are based upon imaginative principles. The basis of your most intimate experience, the framework behind all of your organized structures, rests upon a reality that is not considered valid by the very institutions that are formed through its auspices.
It is now nearing Easter and the yearly commemoration of what is considered historic fact: the [resurrection and] ascension of Christ into heaven. Untold millions have in one way or another commemorated that occasion through the centuries. Private lives have merged with public sentiment and religious fervor. There have been numberless village festivals, or intimate family gatherings, and church services performed on Easter Sundays now forgotten. 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."
There have been spiritual rebirths and regenerations—and ungodly slaughter as well, as a result of the meaning of Easter. Blood and flesh have certainly been touched, then, and lives changed in that regard.
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 idea was the result of a spectacular act of the imagination that then leapt upon the historical landscape, highlighting all of the events of the time, so that they became illuminated indeed with a blessed and unearthly light.
The idea of man's survival of death was not new. The idea of a god's "descent" to earth was ancient. 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 futures 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. The time was ripe for Christianity.
(9:49.) Because man has not understood the characteristics of the world of imagination, he has thus far always insisted upon turning his myths into historical fact, for he considers the factual world alone as the real one. A man, literally of flesh and blood, must then prove beyond all doubt that each and every other [human being] survives death—by dying, of course, and then by rising, physically perceived, into heaven. Each man does survive death, and each woman (with quiet amusement), but only such a literal minded species would insist upon the physical death of a god man as "proof of the pudding."
(Intently:) Again, Christ was not crucified. The historical Christ, as he is thought of, was a man illuminated by psychic realities, touched with the infinite realization that any one given individual was, by virtue of his or her existence, a contact between All That Is and mankind.
Christ saw that in each person divinity and humanity met—and that man survived death by virtue of his existence within the divine. Without exception, all of the horrors connected with Christianity's name came from "following the letter rather than the spirit of the law," or by insistence upon literal interpretations—while the spiritual, imaginative concepts beneath were ignored.
Again, man directs his existence through the use of his imagination— a feat that does distinguish him from the animals. What connects people and separates them is the power of idea and the force of imagination. Patriotism, family loyalty, political affiliations—the ideas behind these have the greatest practical applications in yourworld. You project yourselves into time like children through freely imagining your growth. You instantly color physical experience and nature itself with the tints of your unique imaginative processes. Unless you think quite consistently—and deeply—the importance of the imagination quite escapes you, and yet it literally forms the world that you experience and the mass world in which you live.
SESSION 829, MARCH 22, 1978, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events
You do not understand this point clearly at all, but your social organizations, your governments—these are based upon imaginative principles. The basis of your most intimate experience, the framework behind all of your organized structures, rests upon a reality that is not considered valid by the very institutions that are formed through its auspices.
It is now nearing Easter and the yearly commemoration of what is considered historic fact: the [resurrection and] ascension of Christ into heaven. Untold millions have in one way or another commemorated that occasion through the centuries. Private lives have merged with public sentiment and religious fervor. There have been numberless village festivals, or intimate family gatherings, and church services performed on Easter Sundays now forgotten. 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."
There have been spiritual rebirths and regenerations—and ungodly slaughter as well, as a result of the meaning of Easter. Blood and flesh have certainly been touched, then, and lives changed in that regard.
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 idea was the result of a spectacular act of the imagination that then leapt upon the historical landscape, highlighting all of the events of the time, so that they became illuminated indeed with a blessed and unearthly light.
The idea of man's survival of death was not new. The idea of a god's "descent" to earth was ancient. 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 futures 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. The time was ripe for Christianity.
(9:49.) Because man has not understood the characteristics of the world of imagination, he has thus far always insisted upon turning his myths into historical fact, for he considers the factual world alone as the real one. A man, literally of flesh and blood, must then prove beyond all doubt that each and every other [human being] survives death—by dying, of course, and then by rising, physically perceived, into heaven. Each man does survive death, and each woman (with quiet amusement), but only such a literal minded species would insist upon the physical death of a god man as "proof of the pudding."
(Intently:) Again, Christ was not crucified. The historical Christ, as he is thought of, was a man illuminated by psychic realities, touched with the infinite realization that any one given individual was, by virtue of his or her existence, a contact between All That Is and mankind.
Christ saw that in each person divinity and humanity met—and that man survived death by virtue of his existence within the divine. Without exception, all of the horrors connected with Christianity's name came from "following the letter rather than the spirit of the law," or by insistence upon literal interpretations—while the spiritual, imaginative concepts beneath were ignored.
Again, man directs his existence through the use of his imagination— a feat that does distinguish him from the animals. What connects people and separates them is the power of idea and the force of imagination. Patriotism, family loyalty, political affiliations—the ideas behind these have the greatest practical applications in yourworld. You project yourselves into time like children through freely imagining your growth. You instantly color physical experience and nature itself with the tints of your unique imaginative processes. Unless you think quite consistently—and deeply—the importance of the imagination quite escapes you, and yet it literally forms the world that you experience and the mass world in which you live.
SESSION 829, MARCH 22, 1978, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events
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