“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.”

(Yet she’s not really sure why she gave herself the message to begin Heroics at this time. We speculated that her creative self, knowing the completion of Seven is in sight, wanted her to have another project underway. She trusts her insight, though, and has already written a few pages for the new book. The irony of the situation is that she’s been doing very well on Seven; just yesterday she’d remarked that she intended to begin typing finished copy for the chapters she’s completed so far. But now she’d laid Seven aside — for who knows how long?

(With amusement:) The male scientist considers the rocket his private symbol of sexual power. (Pause.) He feels he has the prerogative to use power in any way he chooses. Now many scientists are “idealists.” (Pause.) They believe that their search for answers, however, justifies almost any means, or sacrifices, not only on their parts but on the parts of others. They become fanatics when they ignore the rights of others, and when they defile life in a misguided attempt to understand it (see Session 850, with Note 3).

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.