“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In the opening notes for Session 852 I wrote that starting with the 846th session for April 4, “Seth has been dictating material for Mass Events on Wednesday evenings only.” Eight weeks later he’s still following that arrangement, that “unspoken agreement” among the three of us. Even last Thursday night’s session was displaced from the evening before. I took it upon myself to present material from two Monday night sessions — 853 and 855.

(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.

The idea [of democracy] expresses the existence of a high idealism — one that demands political and social organizations that are effective to some degree in providing some practical expression of those ideals (emphatically). When those organizations fail and a gulf between idealism and actualized good becomes too great, then such conditions help turn some idealists into fanatics. (Long pause.) Those who follow with great strictness the dictates of either science or religion can switch sides in a moment. The scientist begins tipping tables or whatever, and suddenly disgusted by the limits of scientific knowledge, he turns all of his dedication to what he thinks of as its opposite, or pure intuitive knowledge. Thus, he blocks his reason as fanatically as earlier he blocked his intuitions. The businessman who believed in Darwinian principles and the fight for survival, who justified injustice and perhaps thievery to his ideal of surviving in a competitive world — he suddenly turns into a fundamentalist in religious terms, trying to gain his sense of power now, perhaps, by giving away the wealth he has amassed, all in a tangled attempt to express a natural idealism in a practical world.

How can you trust your impulses when you read, for example, that a man commits a murder because he has a strong impulse to do so, or because the voice of God commanded it? If some of you followed your impulses right now, for example — your first natural ones — it might seem they would be cruel or destructive.

(10:42.) Now Seth went into an analysis of a very vivid dream Jane had recently had, involving her deceased mother. He ended the session at 10:56 P.M.

(When I told her she’d delivered an excellent, often impassioned session, Jane said she’d written half a page this morning that sounded a lot like Seth’s material. “Maybe he’s going to do my own book,” she said, referring to Heroics, “but that’s okay. I don’t care which one of us does it….”)