“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 3:50 PM Jane told me that she’d just received from Seth a definition of cults. She repeated it as best she could: “....a closed, emotionally charged mental environment, in which the characteristics of individuality were purposefully undermined.” Then a little later she picked up some more material while doing her exercises. Some of it drew a comparison between the paranoid individual, and an organization that contained the same ideas. The individual would be called ill for thinking the world was against him, but the organization’s similar beliefs would be more unthinkingly accepted because of its sheer size and power in the society.

Those characteristics are set in the form of an elderly woman whose pace bespeaks wisdom. She has no arms. However, her concern, her love and understanding, are seen only in the expression of her eyes and face. She cannot embrace the world, and so she is armless. Her concern and understanding also have a mental quality, as your own deepest feelings in those regards are expressed through art or writing indirectly, rather than through direct contact with others.

Your mental world is full of ideas and feelings that surge toward actualization. You have a need to express your self—and I am repeating the word “express” quite purposefully (with a smile). You must feel that you are a self, and that you can express that self in the world that you know.

In closed mental environments such expression is vigorously denied, and the very foundations of selfhood are attacked. I will use my own definition of a cult here, saying that a cult exists whenever a group forms a closed, emotionally charged mental environment in which the foundations of individuality are systematically and purposefully undermined.