“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We were very busy with publishing affairs over the weekend. On Friday, April 6, we received from the production department at Prentice-Hall the printer’s page proofs of the index for Seth’s Psyche, and on Saturday morning the proofs for Emir arrived from Eleanor Friede at Delacorte Press. We spent all of our waking hours checking everything, and on Monday Jane called certain people at Prentice-Hall to give her approval of the index while I mailed Emir back to Eleanor.

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.

(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.

The leader of Jonestown was at heart an idealist. When does an idealist turn into a fanatic? (Long pause.) When can the search for the good have catastrophic results, and how can the idealism of science be equated with the near-disaster at Three Mile Island, and with the potential disasters that in your terms exist in the storage of nuclear wastes, or in the production of nuclear bombs?