“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

The power of the water put each individual in touch with intimate recognition of his dependence upon nature, and made him question values taken for granted too long. Such a crisis automatically forces each person to examine values, to make instant choices that will provide him with recognitions to which he had been blind earlier.

Many past beliefs were automatically shattered in the reality of the moment. Powers of initiation and action, long buried, were released in numberless individuals. Federal funds were directed instantly to this region. The spotlight was turned on to the section. (Pause.) Many lonely people were forced, or rather forced themselves, into a situation where it was imperative that they relate with others. Since this is not the main topic of this book, I cannot go deeply into the ways and means involved.