“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Give us a moment... The fanatic is usually also a person whose vitality is blocked in important ways—yet he manages often to summon great energy, so that even in his denunciations he shows many people who are more timid the demonstration of personal exuberance and energy, however misdirected.

(Since I liked him—Michael— as we talked, I sat on the front steps for a few minutes with him. Our neighbor Marian came by, looking for her dog; she stopped to talk to us. By then over half an hour had passed. I gave up on the session. Jane laughed inside the house. We invited our guest in for a beer. He was from Port Arthur, Texas. He was quite intelligent, a musician who had written an “opera,” he told us. Like a number of our other recent callers, he was traveling around the country, seemingly free of all ties, doing odd jobs on occasion, but living on little money. In a way I envied them. Michael had no place to stay, regardless of the weather.

(He stayed until about 12:20 AM, then left, bound for where?.... Jane said the next day that we should have offered him shelter, but I didn’t feel any compulsion to do so. I did think that practically all of our unannounced visitors were young people because the Seth material attracted them much more easily than older generations. I thought it a good sign, actually, since these young people would one day be playing roles in society; at least, I thought, they’d have been exposed to what we thought were good ideas in their formative years.

(As we sat for the session on Sunday night, I read last night’s material to Jane. A few moments later, when he came through Seth took up where he’d left off in mid-sentence:)

Though the fanatic may make much noise in the world, he is actually isolated from all of the world’s ideas except his own. Anything else is seen as a threat. He does not allow the development of his concepts or beliefs, for example. They stop at one particular point—and at that point he wages his battle against reality.

He fears that the admission of one defeat or error of judgment will bring his world crumbling about him.

A man may be a fool, so to speak, in his spiritual or political judgments, as a father or as a brother; or in perhaps only one relationship he may be an artist, bringing out in that other person the greatest abilities and potentials.

Over the years he developed patterns of behavior to deal with threatful situations. In a large manner, and beneath all, the situations themselves could vary, and are not the main issue.

They depend upon conventional authorities for relief. Ruburt was working beyond such authority, and yet his own sense of safety and value had not grown sufficiently so that he could depend upon his own newer beliefs, either. To that extent he carried a double burden, or accepted a double challenge. The entire condition, regardless, was caused by tension of a steady nature. Its original beginnings were in the head area. That is where the tension began.