“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Love perceives the grace in another. Like natural guilt, the state of grace is unconscious in the animals. It is protected. They take it for granted, not knowing what it is or what they do, yet it speaks through all their motions and they dwell in the ancient wisdom of its ways. They do not have conscious memory, again, but the instinctive memory of the cells and organs sustains them. All of this applies in degrees according to the species, and when I speak of conscious memory I am using words that are familiar to you — I mean a memory that can at any time look back through itself.

The splendid biological acceptance of life could not be thrust or forced upon his emerging consciousness, so to be effective, efficient, to emerge in the new focus of awareness, grace had to expand from the life of the tissue to that of the feelings, thoughts and mental processes. Grace became the handmaiden of natural guilt, then.

(Pause at 10:34.) The animal has no such need. It nestles safely within the confines of its instincts while exploring other aspects of awareness with which man is not so intimately familiar. Yet natural grace and natural guilt are given you, and these will also grow more fully into conscious awareness. If you can sit quietly and realize that your body parts are replacing themselves constantly — if you turn your conscious mind into the consideration of such activity — then you can realize your own state of grace. If you can sense your thoughts steadily replacing themselves then you can also feel your own elegance.

To that extent natural guilt projected man into the future. [...] Unfortunately, artificial guilt takes on the same attributes, utilizing both memory and projection. Wars are self-perpetuating because they combine both natural and unnatural guilt, compounded and reinforced by memory. [...]

Natural guilt is also highly connected with memory, and arose hand in hand with mankind’s excursion into the experience of past, present and future. Natural guilt was meant as a preventive measure. [...]

[...] Guilt, natural guilt, depends upon memory then.

[...] Until you work with your beliefs, this guilt can be initiated by the most harmless episodes and characteristics. It is a good idea to write down a list of specific acts or incidents that fill you with a sense of guilt. [...]

(Pause at 9:47.) If you affirm the basic grace of your being, then this will automatically weaken the beliefs you have that are contrary to that principle. [...]

[...] And again, it does not mean that you must smile constantly, but that you affirm your validity and grace within the dimensions of your creaturehood.

[...] It reinforces the animals’ sense of grace, in terms mentioned earlier in this book. [...]

[...] Its sense of grace is built-in. [...]

If you misinterpret the myths, then you may believe that man has fallen from grace and that his very creaturehood is cursed, in which case you will not trust your body or allow it its “natural” pattern of self-therapy.

[...] The natural self operates within a state of grace, by whatever name, a state that allows for spontaneity, and implies self-trust. Most religious concepts, unfortunately, regardless of the original intentions behind them, end up by dividing man from his own sense of grace—his sense of rightness within the universe, and the individual will do almost anything to gain back that sense, for it is highly vital. [...]

[...] When Ruburt left that system intellectually some of the old bonding power remained, the emotional glue, but he no longer believed in the indulgences, the sacraments and so forth, so the Sinful Self was left fairly isolated, still believing to some extent that to “be good” it must be bad, but without the releases of guilt once provided by churchly help and belief. [...]

(9:00.) His Sinful Self therefore tried to restate its position in order to right the situation, but its reasoning, again, was that a sense of grace was dependent upon the prior admission of a sinful reality. [...]

[...] In that light, as in the Catholic one, the female’s guilt is seen as even larger than the male’s. So that additional pressure is cast upon the women, who are indeed seen as spiritually inferior—or (underlined) on the other hand painted as pure, pedestal-like individuals in the manner of the Blessed Virgin. [...]

[...] It is quite earnest in its own desire to “be good,” or to feel a sense of grace in its being, so it does understand that kind of purpose. [...]

(9:38.) The ideas of the flesh itself being graced also seemed quite blasphemous then to the Sinful Self. [...]

3. Among others in The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book, see Chapter 9: Seth discusses the state of grace, natural guilt, artificial guilt, and related subjects.

[...] It means that you live “in a state of grace.”³ You can be unaware of that state. [...]

[...] If you believe that you are of little merit, inferior and filled with guilt, then you may react in several ways according to your personal background and the framework in which you accepted those beliefs. [...]

[...] The natural grace of your being becomes disturbed.

If it seems to you that the soul is degraded by its alliance with the flesh then you will not be able to enjoy your own sense of grace, for you will not consider it possible. [...]

We had a hard time believing him when Seth told us the very next evening, on April 23, that Jane’s sinful self thinks her physical symptoms are necessary “for the personality’s own good”; that that self has no conception that its policies have become self-defeating; that, following Catholic and non-Catholic Christianity, it believes that suffering is good for the soul; that the idea of the flesh itself being graced is, to it, blasphemous.

[...] Its only methods of dealing with such guilt involve standard psychoanalytic counseling—which itself deepens the dilemma, for counseling itself is based upon the idea that the inner self is a reservoir of savage impulses. [...]