“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is obvious to most others that such paranoid views are not based on mass fact. (Pause.) Your President at that time, however, had at his command vast information, so that he was aware of many groups and organizations that did not agree with his policies. He used those as in other circumstances a paranoid might use the sight of a police car to convince himself that he was being pursued by the police, or the FBI or whatever. The President felt threatened — and not only personally threatened, for he felt that the good for which he stood in his own mind was in peril (intently). And again, since the idealized good seemed too remote and difficult to achieve, any means was justified. Those who followed him, in the Cabinet and so forth, possessed the same kinds of characteristics to some degree or another.

Both men and molecules dwell in a field of probabilities, and their paths are not determined. The vast reality of probabilities makes the existence of free will possible. If probabilities did not exist, and if you were not to some degree aware of probable actions and events, not only could you not choose between them, but you would not of course have any feelings of choice (intently). You would be unaware of the entire issue.

(9:03.) Through your mundane conscious choices, you affect all of the events of your world, so that the mass world is the result of multitudinous individual choices. You could not make choices at all if you did not feel impulses to do this or that, so that choices usually involve you in making decisions between various impulses. Impulses are urges toward action. Some are conscious and some are not. Each cell of your body feels (underlined) the impulse toward action, response, and communication. You have been taught not to trust your impulses. Now impulses, however, help you to develop events of natural power. Impulses in children teach them to develop their muscles and minds [each] in their own unique manner. And as you will see, those impulses of a private nature are nevertheless also based upon the greater situation of the species and the planet, so that “ideally” the fulfillment of the individual would automatically lead to the better good of the species.

(I sat working on my notes for the beginning of the session while Jane left the room. When she returned, she said she had things to tell me. “I think it started with Seth, but then I went into another altered state of my own, like the time I got that dream material at the kitchen table — when was that, last March?” [See the 844th session for April 1.]

(“As you learn to trust your natural impulses, they introduce you to your individual sense of power, so that you realize that your own actions do have meaning, that you do affect events, and that you can see some definite signs that you are achieving good ends. The idealized goal isn’t as remote, then, because it is being expressed. Even if that expression is by means of steps, you can point toward it as an accomplishment. Previously we distrusted our own impulses to such an extent that they often appeared in very distorted form.”

Beneath all of the frustrations and upsets we may feel at their surface manifestations, Jane and I are caught up in the deeper meanings of events like those at Jonestown and TMI, for they represent great challenges that our species has set for itself, through this century and beyond. Science and religion must ultimately be reconciled if we are to progress. These challenges aren’t just national, of course, but worldwide: The scientific rationale embodied in TMI runs headlong into the western world’s reliance upon energy supplies — mainly oil — from nations that are largely religiously oriented, and that profess all kinds of antipathy for social orders other than their own. In our lifetimes Jane and I look forward to our species at least making a start at grappling with such large areas of its own activity as science and religion. We must come to terms with those challenges we’ve created — and are creating.