“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) The American experiment with democracy is heroic, bold, and innovative. In historic terms as you understand them, this is the first time that all of the inhabitants of a country were to be legally considered equal citizens one with the other. That was to be, and is, the ideal. In practical terms, of course, there often are inequalities. Treatment in the marketplace, or in society, often shows great divergence from that stated national ideal. Yet the dream is a vital portion of American national life, and even those who are unscrupulous must pay it at least lip service, or cast their plans in its light.

(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.

There was some hope, at least, in looking for better living conditions personally. There was some hope in forgetting one’s doubts in whatever exterior distractions could be found. Idealism is tough, and it is enduring, and no matter how many times it is seemingly slain, it comes back in a different form. So those who felt that religion had failed them looked anew to science, which promised — promised to — provide the closest approximation to heaven on earth: mass production of goods, two cars in every garage, potions for every ailment, solutions for every problem. And it seemed in the beginning that science delivered, for the world was changed from candlelight to electric light to neon in the flicker of an eye, and a man could travel in hours distances that to his father or grandfather took days on end.

Those people look to cults of various kinds, where decisions are made for them, where they are relieved of the burden of an individuality that has been robbed of its sense of power by conflicting beliefs. At one time the males might have been drafted into the army, and, secretly exultant, gone looking for the period before full adulthood — where decisions would be made for them, where they could mark time, and where those who were not fully committed to life could leave it with a sense of honor and dignity.

To one extent or another, all of the events of their lives happen punctuated or accented by the possibility of disaster. They feel that at any time they might be caused to face the greatest challenge, to rely upon their strongest resources, their greatest forbearance, and faced by a test of endurance. They use — or they often use — such a psychological and physical backdrop to keep those qualities alive within themselves, for they are the kind of people who like to feel pitted against a challenge. Often the existence of probabilities and their acceptance does provide a kind of exterior crisis situation that individually and en masse is a symbol of independence and inner crisis. The crisis is met in the exterior situation, and as the people deal with that situation they symbolically deal with their own inner crises. In a way (underlined) those people trust such exterior confrontations, and even count upon a series of them (intently), of varying degrees of severity, that can be used throughout a lifetime for such purposes.