“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.

(After supper tonight, however, Jane chose not to have the session because she felt so free and relaxed. Then a bit later she spontaneously announced she’d hold it after all — early, even. “I don’t know how long I can hold out, though,” she said. “I’m getting great bursts of stuff from Seth about all kinds of things….” She described some of them to me, but I didn’t have time to write them down and couldn’t retain them. She laughed. She was very relaxed. Yet she launched into the session as easily as ever; I had to write fast to keep up with her delivery.)

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.

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.

(8:38.) He concentrated upon the vast gulf that seemed to separate the idealized good and the practical, ever-pervading corruption that in his eyes grew by leaps and bounds. He saw himself as just. Those who did not agree with him, he saw as moral enemies. Eventually it seemed to him that he was surrounded by the corrupt, and that any means at his disposal was justified to bring down those who would threaten the presidency or the state.

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.

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.

(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.]

(Jane began to dictate what she’d just received. This certainly wasn’t Seth coming through. Her voice was rather conversational, yet at the same time it was deliberate in a way quite different from her usual manner of speaking. I began to write at 9:47:

(Jane said: “That’s it as far as I got it. But the idea that each person tries to actualize the idealized good as much as they can through their daily lives — their work, social structures, and so forth — and in the meantime use certain criteria that will help them judge for themselves whether or not their actions are really in line with their ideals. The criteria are actually the ones given in the chapter. That’s all. A whole lot of it was coming to me. I don’t even know if it’s right.