“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.

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.

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.

(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.