“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Comment: now: for all of the fanatic’s display of energy, he feels basically powerless. To your not-so-silent gallery group in New York, for example, you have the power, which may surprise you in some of your querulous moods—but you have the format, the attention, that such people envy and resent.

I said before that no man acts out of the desire to be evil, but has always justified to himself his actions precisely by his own “good” intent. If envy is felt it is not acknowledged. The religious area in general, from time immemorial, has dealt intensely and sometimes one-mindedly with “the good ideal.” That ideal, however, different in one area than in another, was usually self-righteously applied with a vengeance and fanatical zest, so that all things outside it were seen as evil.

This applies regardless of the guises that such narrowness might take. In such concepts any natural goodness, or natural intent in man becomes not only invisible psychologically to the fanatic, but man’s natural nature appears as a direct threat to the ideal projected by dogma of any kind.

Your approach has been the correct one. Here is something objective that signifies what Ruburt once thought of as the threatening world. Fanatics differ from other people obviously only in degree. They are extreme versions.

Those people then can be seen for what they are. Regardless of appearances at sometimes, fanatics do not rule the world. Otherwise there would be none—meaning no world. These are not authority figures putting Ruburt down, or our work. They are sick people. While you are ahead of your times, therefore, it is very important that you realize that the world is not against you. It is not out there ready to pounce.

The world is composed of individuals. It is therefore unrealistic to expect, say, wholesale criticism—or, for that matter, wholesale praise. It is a give-and-take world. In those terms, now, there is an open forum, and within it you make your own reality. No one is going to mistake Ruburt for a fanatic, or a psychic nut, or whatever. He can see through this experience how such people behave. He cannot remotely be considered in that framework—except by fanatics, who are already within it.

When ideals are set more or less artificially, greatly divorced from man’s nature, he cannot begin to live up to them. Usually these are, for one thing, too narrow and sterile. The ensuing guilt is the power that turns such a person into a fanatic. I hope to teach you a tolerance for others, for this will ensure the greatest development of your own abilities, and will also give you a more realistic view of the world.

Fanatics cannot allow such experiences, because they do not want their fears tempered.