“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.

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.