“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.

Crises such as this provide spotlighted views of reality, in which what has been hidden is suddenly only too apparent. In many cases the poor were saved, for most of the old homes and apartment houses survived while the newer ranch-style homes could not stand the onslaught of the water. Yet the college [Elmira College] still found itself with many of the dispossessed needy at its doorstep. Women who had no stronger purpose than playing bridge ended up struggling for survival beside their more destitute sisters. Many of the poor who lost their living quarters discovered qualities of leadership in themselves that astonished them.

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.