“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We also speculated that Seth might refer to what may be called the “Jonestown Affair,” or something like it. This had erupted in a mass suicide, involving over 400 Americans, in the community of Jonestown in what was formerly British Guyana, in South America. A US congressman was also murdered, along with media network people, etc. The sect, called the People’s Temple, had been created by Jim Jones, a charismatic fundamentalist who had eventually been hounded out of the U.S. for many reasons, to then set up his town for his devoted religious followers in Guyana. The whole thing had a weird unbelievability about it, as Jane and I watched the TV reports and read—and saved – the newspaper accounts.

(Actually, the affair is a perfect example of much of the material Seth has been going into in his latest book on the mass culture and mind. To Jane and me, it seemed as if his material was being enacted in real life as the ideal demonstration of Seth’s material. The tragedy, if one wants to call it that, would make an excellent book in itself, and many probably will be written about it. It certainly furnishes ideal subject matter for the media. We also think that these books-to-come will not manage to penetrate the forces behind the phenomenon nearly as well as Seth could, but that Seth won’t be carrying out such a project, either.

They were bitter—but more. They were frightened. They could not free their native abilities—many, now. Jones seemed to be their key to the establishment. He was the opener of doors. He had his picture taken with celebrities, and because he was “a religious man,” the establishment took it for granted that his aims and policies were good, and that he spoke for those who had no voice otherwise.

He was, of course, a despot, and he did indeed set up his own alienated kingdom. Those that followed him pretended to themselves not to know what they were doing. You make your own lessons, so that these mass suicides and murders are an objective culmination, on those peoples’ part, of other, lesser psychological suicides committed on the part of millions who abdicate their personal responsibility in such a way.

The individual either exists for the sake of the society, or the society exists for the sake of the individual. So it seems. Either road, however, brings its own difficulties. An enlightened position would be somewhat different, for a reasonably free individual will automatically want to aid his fellow man, and you will have a society of individuals fully functioning, and that would mean you would have fully functioning social organizations.

(9:27.) Ruburt has had many excellent signs, particularly in his bathroom behavior, this week—as old patterns of posture were broken, and new methods of walking and so forth were tried out. There is some anticipatory motion, in that while in one position the body anticipates new motions—better ones—that it cannot as yet take.