The child or infant is highly suggestible to parental belief systems, so that it can early be provided with a conceptual framework that is complementary to its surroundings, to the group or environment.
The child at such a time for one thing is not in the situation to do conflict with belief systems — it is too young and dependent. The belief systems can be like blocks, which are used and then later changed or replaced, but there is a kind of bonding of the childhood self with those ideas it takes from its parents…
Children want to ‘be good.’ They look for approval…The Sinful Self identification is a particularly unfortunate one, for to ‘be good’ means that the child must consider itself bad or sinful.
Right there, the child is presented with a quandary, of course. Children and adults also need self-respect…
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.
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. You have a divided self of course, in that regard, operationally speaking, and this happens often in your society. The result is repression of one kind or another…
Once such material is out in the open all of the portions of the personality can work together. Until then you have parts operating at the very least without a sense of unity. The Sinful Self was, again, formed in childhood. It can be comforted. It can be told now what it yearned to be told then — that it was indeed good, and not bad or evil, that it could indeed use its curiosity without the threat of abandonment, and that it could trust its own creativity and love of play.
The Sinful Self is ‘an artificial psychological construct’ — thrust upon the natural self to some degree, and at one time it objected thoroughly against such conditioning, so with communication it will be glad to let those old beliefs go — as long as the entire affair is not allowed to go underground, of course.
—Seth, The Personal Sessions: Book 6, April 22, 1981
...The idea is in no way to accuse the Sinful Self. It is instead to understand it, its needs and motives, and to communicate the idea that it was sold a bad bill of goods in childhood — scared out of its wits, maligned.
The idea is to show it that those beliefs no longer apply, that the framework in which they were learned was highly faulty. Instead, itself — the self — is indeed good, as it supposed before it took on such nonsense. Treat it in a way like a frightened child who can be comforted, and who can understand.
It should be made a party to the process, then, very definitely, for it is its transformation and understanding that you seek…
The Sinful Self obviously is not a burden that Ruburt carries alone, but one inherent in your civilization. Unfortunately its values have in their way appeared throughout your culture…No self really needs a baptism. It is already blessed by All That Is before its birth, and its desires, impulses, and characteristics are also inherently good, meant to insure its own fulfillment, to bring out its best characteristics, and to help the rest of the world as well — all very important issues.”
—Seth, The Personal Sessions: Book 6, April 28, 1981
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