“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Although Seth didn’t call this session book dictation, Jane and I decided to show portions of it in Mass Events for two reasons: 1. The material in Note 1 can be taken as an extension of the discussion on reasoning and the intuitions that Seth gave in the 825th session. 2. We want to offer his comments on Jonestown and Three Mile Island in the order received, even if they don’t always come through within the context of “official” book sessions. This thinking also applies to anything Jane and I may want to add on either of those two mass events.

(“I haven’t had too much time to think of questions, but today we were talking about the relationships between Jonestown and Three Mile Island — how those two events stand for the extremes of religion and science.” [See my comments on this double polarity in the opening notes for yesterday’s session.])

The Jonestown people thought that the world was against them, particularly the establishment, and the government of the country. They displayed paranoiac tendencies. The same applies to the scientists, who now feel that the cultural climate is turning against them, that people no longer trust them, so that they fear they will be pulled from high estate.

To coin a phrase, then, we see “fantastically great” lessons in the examples given us by Jonestown and Three Mile Island. We want our country and the world to benefit from those lessons, but at the same time we’re terribly afraid and concerned that our species won’t learn quickly enough. Jane and I want a sane world, in ordinary terms, and we want the freedom to explore every internal and external facet of that world. We want our world — our living world, the very planet itself — and every life form upon it, to exist in the greatest cooperative spirit possible, so that individually and collectively we can investigate what surely must be a myriad of still-unsuspected interior and exterior challenges.

“The idea is that the scientists’ system of beliefs is bound to result in some destructive action; that is, the implied attitudes of today’s scientists lead them to be less careful of life than they should be, and separate them from nature in a way that leads to some contempt on their parts of individual living things. The leaders of religious cults, like that of Jonestown, overexaggerate grandiose ideals of brotherhood and love, for example (as Seth has mentioned), while often forbidding the natural expression of love on the part of one individual for another — assaulting family affiliations and so forth. As a result, the idealized love becomes more and more inaccessible, with the growth of more guilt and despair.