“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Granting that, however, cults interact, and so there is quite a relationship between the state of religion, when it operates as a cult, and the state of science when it operates as a cult. Right now your cultish religions exist in response to the cultish behavior of science. Science insists it does not deal with values, but leaves those to philosophers. In stating that the universe is an accidental creation, however, a meaningless chance conglomeration formed by an unfeeling cosmos, it states quite clearly its belief that the universe and man’s existence has no value. All that remains is what pleasure or accomplishment can somehow be wrested from man’s individual biological processes.

The Harrisburg situation potentially threatened the lives of many thousands, and in that circle of events the characteristics of a cult are less easy to discern. Yet they are present. You have scientific cults as well as religious ones.

(Jane was quite upset before the session this evening, and I’m the one who was responsible for her state. Somehow, after supper, we got on the subject of Seth doing a “quick book” about Jonestown and Three Mile Island, something that could be offered to the public very soon, instead of material that would show up in a regular Seth book a couple of years from now. We already had the perfect title for the book, one we’d jokingly originated following last Monday night’s session: Seth on Jonestown and Three Mile Island: Religious and Scientific Cults.

In scientific terms there was no fallout involved in the disaster at Jonestown. Yet there was of course a psychological fallout, and effects that will be felt throughout the land by people in all walks of life. The Jonestown situation definitely involved all of the characteristics that I have ascribed as belonging to a cult. There was fanaticism, a closed mental environment, the rousing of hopes toward an ideal that seemed unachievable because of the concentration upon all of the barriers that seemed to stand in its way.

[...] 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.

(At 3:50 PM Jane told me that she’d just received from Seth a definition of cults. [...]

[...] You are told not to make decisions, and to give yourself completely to the system of the cult.

There are religious cults, and there are also scientific ones. There are people who follow a cult that is purely private, with rules and regulations as rigorous as any sent down to a group of frightened followers by a despot of whatever kind. [...]

The other heading he gave helps make up the title for the next chapter (6). Add to it: “Religious and Scientific Cults, and Private Paranoias.”

[...] That unfortunate chant is behind the beliefs of many cults — scientific and religious — and Hitler’s Aryan kingdom was a curious interlocking of the worst aspects of religion and science alike, in which their cultish tendencies were encouraged and abetted.

[...] The steps were the ones mentioned earlier (in a number of sessions in Part 3), as those involved with any cult. [...]

[...] He behaved nationalistically, as any minor cult leader does in a smaller context. [...]

These conditions also occur in some varieties of religious cults, whether or not strict sexual segregation is enforced. [...]

(Long pause at 3:34.) You can also find single families, of course, that operate like cults — or an entire nation — that are given over to repression with its resulting violence.

[...] (Emphatically:) These new cults and groups, however—these new cults and groups, therefore—therefore—are following the paths of genetic wisdom, opening up new areas of speculation and belief. [...]

There are grass-roots organizations—cults, groups of every persuasion—growing up in your country as small groups of people together, once again, search for intellectual reasons to back up their innate emotional knowledge that life has meaning. [...]

[...] Cult leaders are more often male than female, and females are more often than not followers, because they have been taught that it is wrong for them to use power, and right for them to follow the powerful.

I said (in Session 846) that you have religious and scientific cults, and the male-oriented scientific community uses its power in the same way that the male Jehovah used his power in a different arena, to protect his friends and destroy his enemies. [...]

(9:49.) Many cults of one kind or another, and many fanatics, seek to divide you from your natural impulses, to impede their expression. [...]

According to conditions, such a person could be a member of a small cult or the head of a nation, a criminal or a national hero, who claims to act with the authority of God. [...]

[...] They help create the dogma or system or cult to which they “fall prey.” [...]

[...] Involved also are her adamant feelings against having the Seth material used as the basis for any kind of cult, with herself as its leader. [...]

[...] It is not a cult in the terms that people often consider material that seems to come from a source beyond the individual who gives it.

The cults that have built up around such happenings are ludicrous, and in some cases unforgivable demonstrations of stupidity by well-meaning but imbecilic personalities. [...]

[...] My answer is, beside my strong affection for you both, that you are unaffiliated with any cult, religion, particular school of thought. [...]

You are indeed correct, of course, and you are also dealing with the behavior of cults in both circumstances, each concerned with a closed system of belief, rigid attitudes, intense emotionally-charged states, and also with what amounts to compulsive behavior.

[...] The leaders of religious cults, like that of Jonestown, overexaggerate grandiose ideals of brotherhood and love, for example (as Seth has mentioned), while often forbidding the natural expression of love on the part of one individual for another — assaulting family affiliations and so forth. [...]

If the major religions have been touched, then there have also been numberless smaller cults and sects throughout history into the present that bear that same stamp of great psychological power and energy, coupled with an inborn leaning toward self destruction and vengeance.

Those people look to cults of various kinds, where decisions are made for them, where they are relieved of the burden of an individuality that has been robbed of its sense of power by conflicting beliefs. [...]

Cults, however, deal primarily with fear, using it as a stimulus. [...]

[...]

[...] (Pause.) Cult after cult will emerge, each unrestrained by the use of reason, because reason will have denied the existence of rampant unconscious knowledge, disorganized and feeling only its own ancient force.

[...] It has been during the annals of history, but many of those fashions also indisputably, and with the best of intentions, managed to give a faulty picture: you ended up with your gods and demons, unwieldy methods and cults, and often with the intellect downgraded. [...]

[...] There were countless cults, and Ruburt as a woman was a prostitute priestess—the term is not a good one—of a particularly sensuous cult that had a connection with the land of Constantinople. [...]

[...] Such systems lead to the formation of cults, and the potential members seek out a leader who will serve their purposes as surely as they seem to serve his — through an inner mechanics of which each member is at least somewhat aware.

[...] They are expressed by many cultures and religions, esoteric groups and cults from the past, and continuing into the present. [...]

[...] “I was part of that cult Seth told you about last time...you know where it was. [...]