“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is far more important that you understand this than that you become overly concerned with labyrinthian “past reasons,” for you can get so lost in a negative approach that you forget that these beliefs can be changed in the present. For various reasons, you hold beliefs that you can alter at any time. Many individuals die young, for example, because they believe so strongly that old age represents a degradation of the spirit and an insult to the body. They do not want to live under the conditions as they believe them to be. Some quite frankly prefer to die in what others would consider to be the most dire circumstances — swept away by the raging waves of an ocean, or crushed in an earthquake, or battered by the winds of a hurricane.

Slow death in a hospital, or an experience with an illness, would be unthinkable to these same people. Some of this has to do with temperament, and with quite normal individual differences and preferences. Many more human beings are aware of their own impending deaths than is generally known. They know and yet pretend they do not know, but those who die in catastrophes choose the experience — the drama, even the terror when that occurs. They prefer to leave physical life in a blaze of perception, battling for their lives, at a point of challenge, “fighting” and not acquiescent.

This recognition can lead them — and often does — to seize their own energy and use it in a strong creative manner. A natural catastrophe or a riot are both energy baths, potent and highly positive in their ways despite their obvious connotations. In your terms this in no way absolves those who start riots, for example, for they will be working within a system of conscious beliefs in which violence begets violence. Yet even here individual differences apply. The inciters of riots are often searching for the manifestation of energy which they do not believe they possess on their own. They light and start psychological fires, and are as transfixed by the results as any arsonist. If they understood and could experience power and energy in themselves they would not need such tactics.

Obviously, many riots are quite consciously instigated. Certainly thousands of individuals, or millions of them, do not consciously decide to bring about a hurricane, or a flood or an earthquake, in the same manner. In the first place, on that level they do not believe such a thing possible. While conscious beliefs have a part to play in such cases, on an individual basis the “inner work” is done just as unconsciously as the body produces physical symptoms. The symptoms often seem to be inflicted upon the body, just as a natural disaster seems to be visited upon the body of the earth. Sudden illnesses are thought of as frightening and unpredictable, with the sufferer a victim, perhaps, of a virus. Sudden tornadoes or earthquakes are seen in the same light, as the result of air currents and temperature, or fault lines instead of viruses. The basic causes of both, however, are the same.

The rich and well-to-do felt threatened, for they had changed the status quo by their insistence upon modernity and progress, thus releasing the energy of the needy. There was movement of the middle class from the city proper into the suburbs, with a change in the tax balance, and the city merchants began to suffer. The locality had no great sense of unity as a region, or overall pride in itself as a cultural or natural identity.

Again, all of this involved other areas affected by the flood. As certain primitives do rain dances and consciously bring about rain, deliberately directing unconscious forces, so the people in these different places did the same thing quite automatically, without awareness of the processes involved.

(12:11.) The downtown area saw its inner, always known but hidden predicament, physically materialized. It was in a state of near ruin and needed drastic help. City government was suddenly confronted with a reality that had little to do with conference rooms. The crisis united the people. The feeling of hopelessness was out in the open for all to see, and therefore action could be taken.

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