“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

(“Oh, that reminds me,” she added. “Remember that letter we got today from a reader, about pollution? I picked up something about that, too: The real question, for example, isn’t one of planetary pollution, or nuclear wastes, but the beliefs that make such questions even arise, and the attitudes that see an idealized good worth such risks. That is, people aren’t polluting the world out of greed alone, but for the economic good of all. It’s just that the means they often choose aren’t justified by those ends….”)

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.