“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Monday night’s session is a private one.

(9:49.) Many cults of one kind or another, and many fanatics, seek to divide you from your natural impulses, to impede their expression. They seek to sabotage your belief in your spontaneous being, so that the great power of impulses becomes damned up. Avenues of probabilities are closed bit by bit until you do indeed live — if you follow such precepts — in a closed mental environment, in which it seems you are powerless. It seems you cannot impress the world as you wish, that your ideals must always be stillborn.

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.

I am not speaking of anything (pause) like “repression,” as it is used by psychologists, but a far deeper issue: one in which the very self is so distrusted that natural impulses of any kind become suspect. You try to inoculate yourselves against yourselves — a nearly impossible situation, of course. You expect your motives to be selfish because you have been told that they are, and so when you catch yourselves with unkind motives you are almost comforted, because you think that at least you are behaving normally.

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.

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.

(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….”)