“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This might sound like a bit of overly optimistic, though maybe delightful, nonsense. To a degree, however, that suggestion worked for millions of people. It was not a cure-all. It did not help those who believed in the basic untrustworthiness of their own natures. The suggestion was far from a bit of fluff, however, for it could serve — and it did — as a framework about which new beliefs could rally.

(Pause.) You have occasional epidemics that flare up, with victims left dead. Partially, these are also victims of beliefs, for you believe that the natural body is the natural prey of viruses and diseases over which you have no personal control, except as it is medically provided. In the medical profession, the overall suggestion that operates is one that emphasizes and exaggerates the body’s vulnerability, and plays down its natural healing abilities. People die when they are ready to die, for reasons that are their own. No person dies without a reason.² You are not taught that, however, so people do not recognize their own reasons for dying, and they are not taught to recognize their own reasons for living — because you are told that life itself is an accident in a cosmic game of chance.

(9:33.) Therefore, you cannot trust your own intuitions. You think that your purpose in life must be to be something else, or someone else, than you are. In such a situation many people seek out causes, and hope to merge the purposes of the cause with their own unrecognized one.

There have been many great men and women involved in causes, to which they gave their energies, resources, and support. Those people, however, recognized the importance of their own beings, and added that vitality to causes in which they believed. They did not submerge their individuality to causes. Instead, they asserted their individuality, and became more themselves. They extended their horizons, pushed beyond the conventional mental landscapes — driven by zest and vitality, by curiosity and love, and not by fear (all of the above with much emphasis).

Many people lost their lives recently in the tragedy of [Jonestown] Guyana. People willingly took poison at the command of their leader. No armies stood outside the grounds. No bombs fell. There was no physical virus that spread through the multitude. There was no clothing to decorate the mechanisms of events. Those people succumbed to an epidemic of beliefs, to an environment [that was] closed mentally and physically. The villains consisted of the following ideas: that the world is unsafe, and growing deadly; that the species itself is tainted by a deadly intent; that the individual has no power over his or her reality; that society or social conditions exist as things in themselves, and that their purposes run directly counter to the fulfillment of the individual; and lastly, that the end justifies the means, and that the action of any kind of god is powerless in the world.

Man is of good intent. When you see evil everywhere in man’s intent — in your own actions and those of others — then you set yourself up against your own existence, and that of your kind. You focus upon the gulf between your ideals and your experience, until the gulf is all that is real. You will not see man’s good intent, or you will do so ironically — for in comparison with your ideals, good in the world appears to be so minute as to be a mockery.

(9:56.) To this extent experience becomes closed. Such people are frightened of themselves, and of the nature of their existence. They may be intelligent or stupid, gifted or mundane, but they are frightened of experiencing themselves as themselves, or of acting according to their own wishes. They help create the dogma or system or cult to which they “fall prey.” They expect their leader to act for them. To a certain extent he soaks up their paranoia, until it becomes an unquenchable force in him, and he is their “victim” as much as his followers are his “victims.”

(Long pause at 10:14.) They finally retreated into isolation from the world that they knew, and the voice of their leader at the microphone was a magnified merging of their own voices. In death they fulfilled their purposes, making a mass statement. It would make Americans question the nature of their society, of their religions, their politics, and their beliefs.

1. Seth cited the same famous autosuggestion from the work of the French psychotherapist, Emile Coué (1857–1926), in Chapter 4 of Personal Reality, and then as now, he was correct except for the first two words. He should have said: “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” In a note for Personal Reality I wrote that “Coué was a pioneer in the study of suggestion, and wrote a book on the subject in the 1920s. His ideas were well received in Europe at the time, but weren’t in this country to any large degree. In fact, his lecture tour of the United States turned out to be a failure because of the hostile press reaction.”

3. After this session, I was rather surprised when Jane told me that the Jonestown tragedy was an emotionally charged subject for her, and that Seth knew it. I should have known it, too. She explained that it was disturbing for her “because the whole thing is an example of how a mad visionary can lead his people to destruction in the name of religion.” Involved in her feelings, of course, are her own youthful conflicts with the Roman Catholic Church; these led to her abandoning organized religion by the time she was 18. Involved also are her adamant feelings against having the Seth material used as the basis for any kind of cult, with herself as its leader. Hence, she’s continually examining Seth’s revelatory material — and her own — with very critical eyes to make sure she isn’t “a self-deluded nut leading people astray.” Religious fanaticism frightens her because she regards it as being but a short step beyond fundamentalism, which is on the upsurge in this country. See Seth’s material on evolution and fundamentalism in Session 829.

Jane laughed when I asked her why she hadn’t told me of her feelings about Jonestown before: “You never asked me.” She hadn’t meant to be secretive, she added, but had simply accepted her attitudes as being based upon her own strong beliefs. The mass deaths at Jonestown (in November 1978) took place during our long layoff from book dictation, but Seth began discussing the affair almost at once in our private material, as Jane described in her own portion of the opening notes for Session 831. Now she told me that Seth introduced the subject in that manner so that later she’d be more at ease dealing with it for Mass Events.