“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane had said before the 846th session, which she held a week ago, that she wanted Seth “to get back to” book dictation, and Seth had obligingly given the heading for Chapter 7 at the end of the session. Yet in Monday night’s deleted 847th session that “energy personality essence,” as he calls himself, digressed once again from work on Mass Events to give us more excellent material on plant and animal consciousness. He also discussed such divergent topics as the wide variety of responses that his material generates in correspondents — and not all of those reactions are so favorable, I might add.

Dictation. (Loudly:) Various — this is the beginning of the next chapter (7) — the headings were given — various kinds of governments represent the exercise of different aspects of consciousness.

(Long pause.) In the past, and in large areas of the world now, many important decisions are not made by the individual, but by the state, or religion, or society. In this century several issues came to the forefront of American culture: the exteriorization of organized religion, which became more of a social rather than a spiritual entity, and the joining of science with technology and moneyed interests. Ruburt’s book on [William] James would be good background material here, particularly the sections dealing with democracy and spiritualism. In any case, on the one hand each individual was to be equal with each other person. Marriages, for example, were no longer arranged. A man no longer need follow his father’s vocational footsteps. Young adults found themselves faced with a multitudinous number of personal decisions that in other cultures were made more or less automatically. The development of transportation opened up the country, so that an individual was no longer bound to his or her native town or region. All of this meant that man’s conscious mind was about to expand its strengths, its abilities, and its reach. The country was — and still is — brimming with idealism.

In the public mind, it made little difference whether the devil or tainted genes condemned the individual to a life in which it seemed he could have little control. He began to feel powerless. He began to feel that social action itself was of little value, for if man’s evil were built-in, for whatever reasons, then where was there any hope?

Now: People who live in tornado country carry the reality of a tornado in their minds and hearts as a psychological background.

I bid you a fond, and even a jolly good evening. And Ruburt’s (Jane’s) material on plants may lead him to some most creative extensions of his own consciousness, and new insights.