“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane started a new book today, and she’s exhilarated — intoxicated — by this development in her creative abilities. It came about because of a seemingly innocuous accident — an event that could hardly have been accidental at all.

(This morning, while working on Chapter 18 of Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time, she’d abruptly felt the impulse to move into another room; she wanted to get away from the sunlight glaring through the thin drapes covering the sliding glass doors of her study at the back of the house. On her way out of the room she picked up a loose-leaf notebook that contained, she thought, her entries in her daily journal. In the living room, Jane discovered that instead she’d chosen her notebook on “Heroics.” It holds many of the notes on the heroic self, and heroic impulses, that she’d discussed in chapters 25–27 of Psychic Politics, which had been published in 1976. It also contains a number of ideas on heroics that she’d written after finishing that work. “When I looked at those notes I knew all of a sudden that I was to do that book — Heroics — that I was to keep on looking for the heroic self I’d written about in Politics,” she told me as we ate lunch. “Now’s the time for it.”

He does not trust his own self-structure, or his ability to act effectively. Joint action seems the only course, but a joint action in which each individual must actually be forced to act, driven by frenzy, or fear or hatred, incensed and provoked, for otherwise the fanatic fears that no action at all will be taken toward “the ideal.”

Fanatics always use ringing rhetoric, and speak in the highest terms of truth, good and evil, and particularly of retribution. To some extent capital punishment is the act of a fanatical society: The taking of the murderer’s life does not bring back the victim’s, and it does not prevent other men from [committing] such crimes. I am aware that the death penalty often seems to be a practical solution — and indeed many murderers want to die, and are caught because of their need for punishment. Many, now — and I am speaking generally — are in the position they are because they so thoroughly believe what all of you believe to a large extent: that you are flawed creatures, spawned by a meaningless universe, or made by a vengeful God and damaged by original sin.

Criminals act out those beliefs to perfection. Their “tendencies” are those that each of you fears you possess. Science and religion each tell you that left alone you will spontaneously be primitive creatures, filled with uncontrolled lust and avarice. Both Freud and Jehovah gave you that message. Poor Darwin tried to make sense of it all, but failed miserably.

(10:08.) There are periods in which it certainly seems to some that all standards vanish, and so they yearn for old authorities. And there are always fanatics there to stand for ultimate truth, and to lift from the individual the challenge and “burden” of personal achievement and responsibility. Individuals can — they can — survive without organizations. Organizations cannot survive without individuals, and the most effective organizations are assemblies of individuals who assert their own private power in a group, and do not seek to hide within it (all very emphatically).

(Pause.) Fanatics exist because of the great gap between an idealized good and an exaggerated version of its opposite. The idealized good is projected into the future, while its exaggerated opposite is seen to pervade the present. The individual is seen as powerless to work alone toward that ideal with any sureness of success. Because of his belief in his powerlessness [the fanatic] feels that any means to an end is justified. Behind all this is the belief that spontaneously the ideal will never be achieved, and that, indeed, on his own man is getting worse and worse in every aspect: How can flawed selves ever hope to spontaneously achieve any good?