“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.

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?

(Pause.) The various potions taken faithfully by the public were now often found to have very unfortunate side effects. The chemicals used to protect agriculture had harmful effects upon people. Such situations bothered the individual far more than the threat of nuclear disaster, for they involved his contact with daily life: the products that he bought, the medicines that he took.

Cults, however, deal primarily with fear, using it as a stimulus. They further erode the power of the individual, so that he is frightened to leave. The group has power. The individual has none, except that the power of the group is vested in its leader. Those who died in Guyana, for example, were suicidally inclined. They had no cause to live for, because their idealism became so separated from any particular actualization that they were left only with its ashes.