“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I didn’t get carried away by the idea this evening, but I was certainly taken with it as we talked. Yet I could see that I confused Jane, for to make such a venture possible we’d have to change certain beliefs and values that are deeply rooted within us; especially those about personal privacy and our reluctance to “go public” with such topical, immediate material, instead of trusting that the Seth material will exert a meaningful influence in society over the long run. Also involved would be the instant criticisms we’d encounter. But I think the main portion of my enthusiasm stemmed from the frustration I often feel because much of Seth’s material will go unpublished at this time. This year alone, for instance, he’s already given a good amount of excellent information upon a number of nonbook topics — among them the interpretation of dreams; human, animal, and plant consciousness, and the interactions among them; human sexuality; viruses and inoculation; other realities he himself inhabits, and so forth. We’re sorry to think that such material will be shelved indefinitely, but there’s no room for most of it in Mass Events, and there probably won’t be in future books either. I do try to give hints and clues to some of it in this book, though, as I’ve done recently in sessions 841 and 844–45.

Most cults have their own specialized language of one kind of another — particular phrases used repetitiously — and this special language further serves to divorce the devotees from the rest of the world. This practice was also followed by those at Jonestown. Loyalty to friends and family was discouraged, and so those in Jonestown had left strong bonds of intimacy behind. They felt threatened by the world, which was painted by their beliefs so that it presented a picture of unmitigated evil and corruption. (Pause.) All of this should be fairly well recognized by now. The situation led to the deaths of hundreds.

Religion and science both loudly proclaim their search for truth, although they are seemingly involved in completely opposing systems. They both treat their beliefs as truths (underlined), with which no one should tamper. They search for beginnings and endings. The scientists have their own vocabulary, which is used to reinforce the exclusive nature of science. Now I am speaking of the body of science in general terms here, for there is in a way a body of science that exists as a result of each individual scientist’s participation. A given scientist may act quite differently in his family life and as a scientist. He may love his family dog, for example, while at the same time think nothing of injecting other animals with diseased tissue in his professional capacity.

Granting that, however, cults interact, and so there is quite a relationship between the state of religion, when it operates as a cult, and the state of science when it operates as a cult. Right now your cultish religions exist in response to the cultish behavior of science. Science insists it does not deal with values, but leaves those to philosophers. In stating that the universe is an accidental creation, however, a meaningless chance conglomeration formed by an unfeeling cosmos, it states quite clearly its belief that the universe and man’s existence has no value. All that remains is what pleasure or accomplishment can somehow be wrested from man’s individual biological processes.

Now those beliefs separate man from his own nature.¹ He cannot trust himself — for who can rely upon the accidental bubblings of hormones and chemicals that somehow form a stew called consciousness (louder and quite ironic) — an unsavory brew at best, so the field of science will forever escape opening up into any great vision of the meaning of life. (Long pause.) It cannot value life, and so in its search for the ideal it can indeed justify in its philosophy the possibility of an accident that might kill many many people through direct or indirect means, and kill the unborn as well.²