“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The regularly scheduled book session for last night was not held. We sat for it as usual, but became involved watching the last episode of a television mini-series about events growing out of the Watergate break-in.² While we followed the drama, Jane reported to me a steady flow of comments about it from Seth. More often than not he was quite amused as he gave them to her. She also picked up from him the heading of Chapter 8 for Mass Events: “Men, Molecules, Power, and Free Will.” We decided to reschedule the session for this evening.

Before we end this particular section of the book, dealing with frightened people, idealism, and interpretations of good and evil, there is another instance that I would like to mention. It is the Watergate affair. Last evening, Ruburt and Joseph watched a (television) movie — a fictional dramatization of the Watergate events. Ordinarily a session would have been held, but Ruburt was interested in the movie, and I was interested in Ruburt’s and Joseph’s reactions to it.

To some extent or another, I watched the program with our friends. Actually, I allowed myself to become aware mainly of Ruburt’s perceptions as he viewed the motion picture. By one of those curious coincidences that are not coincidences at all, another dramatic rendition of that same Watergate saga was simultaneously showing on another channel — this one depicting the second spiritual birth of one of the President’s finest cohorts.

(Pause.) No one is as fanatical, and no one can be more cruel, than the self-righteous. It is very easy for such persons “to become [religiously] converted” after such episodes (as Watergate), lining themselves up once more on the side of good, searching for “the power of fellowship,” turning to church rather than government, hearing in one way or another the voice of God.

2. Early on the morning of June 17, 1972, five men were arrested inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Washington, D.C., apartment-hotel-office complex known as the Watergate. The men were employed by the “plumbers,” a secret group working for the Republican President Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President, and their tasks were to photograph records and to check upon listening devices — “bugs” — that had been planted in the offices during a first illegal entry in May. The detection of the break-in at Watergate both uncovered and perpetuated a labyrinthian series of events that culminated in the resignation of President Nixon on August 9, 1974.