“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We often have in your society the opposite suggestion, however, given quite regularly: “Every day, in every way, I am growing worse, and so is the world.” You have meditations for disaster, beliefs that invite private and mass tragedies. They are usually masked by the polite clothing of conventional acceptance. (Pause.) Many thousands may die in a particular battle or war, for example. The deaths are accepted almost as a matter of course. These are victims of war, without question. It seldom occurs to anyone that these are victims of beliefs (emphatically) — since the guns are quite real, and the bombs and the combat.

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.

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.