“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.”

In the Guyana affair, you had “red-blooded Americans” dying on a foreign shore (in South America), but not under a banner of war, which under certain circumstances would have been acceptable. You did not have Americans dying in a bloody revolution, caught among terrorists. You had instead Americans succumbing in a foreign land to some beliefs that are peculiarly American, and home-grown.

Many young men and women have come to adulthood in fine ranch houses in good neighborhoods. They would seem to be at the peak of life, the product of the best America has to offer. They never had to work for a living, perhaps. They may have attended colleges — but they are the first to realize that such advantages do not necessarily add to the quality of life, for they are the first to arrive at such an enviable position.

The parents have worked to give their children such advantages, and the parents themselves are somewhat confused by their children’s attitudes. The money and position, however, have often been attained as a result of the belief in man’s competitive nature — and that belief itself erodes the very prizes it produces: The fruit is bitter in the mouth. Many of the parents believed, quite simply, that the purpose of life was to make more money. Virtue consisted of the best car, or house or swimming pool — proof that one could survive in a tooth-and-claw world. But the children wondered: What about those other feelings that stirred in their consciousnesses? What about those purposes they sensed? The hearts of some of them were like vacuums, waiting to be filled. They looked for values, but at the same time they felt that they were themselves sons and daughters of a species tainted, at loose ends, with no clear destinations.

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.