“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your country, far more than others, has been a country of individualists, do-it-yourselfers—a country of enthusiasts—and of course some fanatics, but a country of pioneers in one fashion or another. As a young mean, Nearing, as he told you, was aware of spiritualism, and of those very aspects that were so explored by James, and he was fascinated. Spiritualism exists with such fervor in your country because Americans like the idea of a communication with the dead on an individual basis, minus the intervention of priests, and hence the pioneering spirit was early tuned to do-it-yourself séances and the like. Americans would explore the spiritual world as they pioneered the physical continent.

Emerson, Whitman, to some extent Thoreau—these were men who spoke of self-reliance, either in the natural or the spiritual world, or both. Gifted young men of Nearing’s period had to some extent then two lines of endeavor.

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.

(10:14.) He was too spiritually violent for the socialists or the communists. He was too socialistically inclined by far for the establishment, and when he turned finally to the land, it was a proud and yet defiant retreat. He would show how the individual could operate as divorced as possible from government. He was an esthetic in workingman’s clothes, despite himself, espousing the old Protestant virtues of diligence, hard work, and no nonsense and no frills.

These were all exterior versions of his inner spiritual journeys, for he now looked to nature for support, sustenance, and strength. He looked to nature’s virtues. It was not greedy, nor would he be. He revived within himself, and within others, the American pioneering spirit, with its distrust of government, its individualism, and its eccentrics.

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?