Happy Easter, Seth Style

[Deb]

No one says it better than Seth. Something to consider:

"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."

From The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Session 829

"It is now nearing Easter (on March 26, 1978), 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 future.

"The miraculous merging of imagination with historical time, however, became less and less synchronized, so that only rites remained and the old gods seized the imagination no longer. The time was ripe for Christianity. ...

"Each man does survive death, and each woman, but only such a literal-minded species would insist upon the physical death of a god-man as 'proof of the pudding.'

"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."