“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.

For many people, a natural calamity provides their first personal experience with the realities of creaturehood’s connection with the planet. Under such conditions men who feel a part of nothing, of no structure or family or country, can understand in a flash their comradeship with the earth, their place upon it and its energy; through suddenly recognizing that relationship they feel their own power for action.

The overall emotional tone or feeling-level of masses of people, through their body connections with the environment, brings about the exterior physical conditions that initiate such an onslaught of natural energy. (Seth describes feeling-tones in the 613th session in Chapter One.) According to the mass emotional conditions, various excesses are built up physically; these are then thrown off into the atmosphere in different form. The ghost chemicals mentioned earlier (in the last session) play a part here, and the electromagnetic properties of emotions. A rock in a stream will divide the water so that it must flow around the impediment. Your emotions are quite as real as rocks. Your collective feelings affect the flow of energy and their force — in terms of natural phenomena — can be seen quite clearly in a thunderstorm, which is the exteriorized local materialization of the inner emotional state of the people experiencing the storm.

As your conscious beliefs determine your bodily condition, and as your body is maintained at an unconscious level (though in line with your beliefs), so natural catastrophes are the result of the beliefs that give rise to emotional states which are then automatically transformed into exterior atmospheric conditions.

(11:09.) Then, according to your beliefs, you deal with the physical dilemma as it is presented in those terms. You will react individually with your own purposes in mind. Your own unique and highly private beliefs help bring about the overall emotional condition. The pool of emotional energy into which your emotions flow is still composed of unalike charges, but generally speaking, the individual contribution of all those participating will fall into a coherent pattern that gives impetus and direction to the storm, providing the charge and the power behind it.

Locally, there were some general beliefs held: The Elmira region was economically depressed and considered to be in a backwash area of the state of New York, yet the condition was not bad enough for crisis aid. Industry had been moving away. People were out of work; the old routines of livelihood had been uprooted. There was no inspiring local leadership, and a variety of different kinds of individuals felt ill at ease, depressed and forced to the wall.

Locally you had a depressed region not yet in the kind of crisis situation that would draw great federal funds, and highly unstable social and economic conditions coupled with a sense of hopelessness.