“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Nearing then wondered how democracy could operate, when—as he saw it then—capitalism kept the poor poor, and added to the gains of the wealthy. He grew sore with the worker’s plight, and felt that thoughts of art, spiritual merit, or pretensions were meaningless if men were ill-fed. Therefore, he turned his efforts to bettering his fellow man’s physical state. He butted his head against the government. In a fashion this involved old Christian principles, of course, as pure socialism does—so that a man shared his goods with his fellows, and all land belonged to the people, so that private property—in those terms—would not exist.

As he grew older, however, he remembered more and more that scent of spiritual exploration, the encounters with spiritualism, and he began to wonder if after all it were possible that spiritual nourishment of itself would better man’s state. Had he put the cart before the horse? And what good was the most equitable arrangement of land or property, of food or goods, if the ordinary worker was still somehow basically discontented?

(10:28. A note: The next day, Jane and I saw the Nearings in color on a national TV broadcast from the festivities at Mansfield. It might also be of interest to note that the younger man—with wife, whom none of us met—knew in Mansfield of the Jupenlasz family. They were probably my parents’ closest friends in Mansfield, and the Jupenlasz girls, Matilda and Gertrude, used to baby-sit for Loren and me. I learned to my surprise from our chauffeur that the father, Fred Jupenlasz, whom I remember well, had only recently died at the age of 85. For some reason, I’m not sure of the first name of Fred’s wife, whom all of us liked very much. In later life she was severely crippled with arthritis. In vivid memory is a picture of her attempting to get out of the family car in front of 704 N. Wilbur Avenue, in Sayre, after Fred had driven the family over to see my parents for a visit—probably on a Sunday.