“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

The President at the time, and through all of his life before (pause), was at heart a stern, repressed idealist of a rather conventionally religious kind. He believed in an idealized good, while believing most firmly and simultaneously that man was fatally flawed (loudly), filled with evil, more naturally given to bad rather than good intent. He believed in the absolute necessity of power, while convinced at the same time that he did not possess it; and further, he believed that in the most basic terms the individual was powerless to alter the devastating march of evil and corruption that he saw within the country, and in all the other countries of the world. No matter how much power he achieved, it seemed to him that others had more — other people, other groups, other countries — but their power he saw as evil. For while he believed in the existence of an idealized good, he felt that the wicked were powerful and the good were weak and without vigor.

He was as paranoid as any poor deluded man or woman is who feels, without evidence, that he or she is being pursued by creatures from space, earthly or terrestrial enemies, or evil psychic powers. Those poor people will build up for themselves a logical sequence of events, in which the most innocent encounter is turned into a frightening threat. They will project that fear outward until they seem to meet it in each person they encounter.