“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(While eating supper this evening Jane and I watched the television reports on the series of devastating tornadoes that had struck northern Texas and southern Oklahoma — an area known as “Tornado Alley” — late yesterday afternoon. Over 50 people have been counted dead so far, with hundreds injured and many thousands left homeless. We’ve driven through some of the communities that were damaged. We talked about why people would choose to live in a region where it’s practically certain that such storms will materialize every year. Our questions would also apply to living in any dangerous environment on the planet, of course.

(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.

And while science provided newer and newer comforts and conveniences, few questions were asked. There was, however, no doubt about it: Exterior conditions had improved (underlined), yet the individual did not seem any happier. By this time it was apparent that the discoveries of science could also have a darker side. Life’s exterior conveniences would hardly matter if science’s knowledge was used to undermine the very foundations of life itself.

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.

In the past also, even in your country, there were convents and monasteries for those who did not want to live in the world as other people did. They might pursue other goals, but the decisions of where to live, what to do, where to go, how to live, would be made for them. Usually such people were joined by common interests, a sense of honor, and there was no retaliation to be feared in this century.