“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Some of this has been discussed earlier in this book. In the case of the Jonestown tragedy, for example, all doors toward probable effective action seemed closed. Followers had been taught to act against their natural impulses with members of their families. They had been taught not to trust the outside world, and little by little the gap between misguided idealism and an exaggerated version of the world’s evil blocked all doors through which power could be exerted — all doors save one. The desire for suicide is often the last recourse left to frightened people whose natural impulses toward action have been damned up — intensified on the one hand, and yet denied any practical expression.

Often the insecticide kills more than the mosquito, and its effects can be far-reaching, and possibly have disastrous consequences. However, to consider impulses as chaotic, meaningless — or worse, detrimental to an ordered life — represents a very dangerous attitude indeed; an attempt that causes many of your other problems, an attempt that does often distort the nature of impulses. Each person is fired by the desire to act, and to act beneficially, altruistically (intently), to practically put his stamp, or her stamp, upon the world. When such natural impulses toward action are constantly denied over a period of time, when they are distrusted, when an individual feels in battle with his or her own impulses and shuts down the doors toward probable actions, then that intensity can explode into whatever avenue of escape is still left open.

It may seem that (underlined) impulsive actions run rampant in society, in cultish behavior, for example, or in the behavior of criminals, or on the part of youth, but such activities show instead the power of impulses denied their natural expression, intensified and focused on the one hand into highly ritualized patterns of behavior, and in other areas denied expression.

(Pause.) A particular idealist believes that the world is headed for disaster, and [that] he is powerless to prevent it. Having denied his impulses, believing them wrong, and having impeded his expression of his own power to affect others, he might, for example, “hear the voice of God.” That voice might tell him to commit any of a number of nefarious actions — to assassinate the enemies that stand in the way of his great ideal — and it might seem to him and to others that he has a natural impulse to kill, and indeed an inner decree from God to do so.

According to conditions, such a person could be a member of a small cult or the head of a nation, a criminal or a national hero, who claims to act with the authority of God. Again, the desire and motivation to act is so strong within each person that it will not be denied, and when it is denied then it can be expressed in a perverted form. Man must not only act, but he must act constructively, and he must feel that he acts for good ends.

Only when the natural impulse (to act constructively) is denied consistently does the idealist turn into a fanatic. Each person in his or her own way is an idealist.