“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If someone is caught in a natural disaster, the following questions might be asked: “Am I being punished by God, and for what reason? Is the disaster the result of God’s vengeance?” A scientist might ask instead: “With better technology and information, could we somehow have predicted the disaster, and saved many lives?” He might try to dissociate himself from emotion, and to see the disaster simply as the result of a nonpersonal nature that did not know or care what lay in its path.

In this part (2) of the book, we are more or less dealing with the events of nature as you understand it. It will seem obvious to some, again, that a natural disaster is caused by God’s vengeance, or is at least a divine reminder to repent, while others will take it for granted that such a catastrophe is completely neutral in character, impersonal and [quite] divorced from man’s own emotional reality. The Christian scientist is caught in between. Because you divorce yourselves from nature, you are not able to understand its manifestations. Often your myths get in the way. When myths become standardized, and too literal, when you begin to tie them too tightly to the world of facts, then you misread them entirely. When myths become most factual they are already becoming less real. Their power becomes constrained.

[...] They may seek out areas of the country in which natural disasters are frequent, or their behavior may be such that they attract from other people reactions of an explosive kind. Often, however, individuals use disasters quite for their own purposes, as an exteriorized force that brings their lives into clear focus. [...]

(Long pause.) Those who “lose” their lives in natural disasters become victims of nature. [...]

[...] When people are hurt in a natural disaster, for example, they will often profess to have no idea at all for such involvement. [...]

[...] For now I would like to mention some other issues, involving the individual’s connection either with natural disasters or with epidemics of one kind or another, that by definition concern large groups of people.

[...] It is you who project disasters into the month of April... whenever disasters occur. And it is you who project disasters into consciousness when those disasters occur.

[...] It is you who project disasters into the month of April—whenever disasters occur. And it is you who projects disasters into consciousness when those disasters occur. [...]

I told you that a dis-ease (with the hyphen) can have a creative basis (in the 620th session in Chapter Four). And so can an earthquake or a natural disaster.

[...] Some people change their plans and leave town a day before a disaster comes about. [...]

[...] No one dies in a disaster who has not chosen to do so. [...]

[...] They will utilize the physical catastrophe as an individual might use a symptom for purposes of challenge, growth, or understanding — but they will choose their disaster just as they will choose their symptoms. [...]

[...] The grandeurs and disasters of such civilizations were contained. [...]

[...] Disasters are no longer localized or contained. [...]

There were wars before, and threats and disasters, but people in countries that were safe were not daily confronted with those other realities, so consciousness has taken upon itself this additional opportunity and burden, in that each person, largely speaking, is far more aware of events in other corners of the world—natives in deepest bush country have transistors.

[...] (Long pause.) When can the search for the good have catastrophic results, and how can the idealism of science be equated with the near-disaster at Three Mile Island, and with the potential disasters that in your terms exist in the storage of nuclear wastes, or in the production of nuclear bombs?

[...] Such situations bothered the individual far more than the threat of nuclear disaster, for they involved his contact with daily life: the products that he bought, the medicines that he took.

To one extent or another, all of the events of their lives happen punctuated or accented by the possibility of disaster. [...]

[...] If you are also of a highly pessimistic nature, given to thoughts and feelings of potential disaster, then these thoughts will be quite faithfully reproduced in experience.

[...] If you happen to live in an area where the coordinate environment is strong, one of those areas I have spoken of as unusually conducive, then it will seem that you are deluged by illnesses or disasters, if these are the nature of your thoughts, because all thought is so fertile in this environment. [...]

(Long pause.) Natural disasters represent an understandably prejudiced concept, in which the vast creative and rejuvenating elements important to planetary life, and therefore to mankind, are ignored. [...]

[...] You are never victims of natural disasters, though it may seem that you are, for you have your hand in forming them. [...]

In those terms, natural disasters ultimately end up righting a condition that earlier blighted the desired quality of life, so that adjustments were made.

Those people were aware just beneath consciousness of the possibilities of such an event long before the disaster occurred, and could until the last moment choose to avoid the encounter. [...]

Many depressives concentrate almost devotedly upon the miseries of the world — the probable disasters that could bring about its end. They remind themselves that the planet is overpopulated, and project into the future the most dire of disasters, man-made and natural.

[...] The individual person can then prepare for a potential disaster. [...] And mankind itself is innately equipped to “foresee” such potential disasters.

[...] If they did not die of the disease, they may have “fallen prey” to an accident, or died in a war, or in a natural disaster.

(Pause.) The Jonestown disaster happened (in November 1978) long after we began this book (in April 1977). Just lately another event occurred — a breakdown and near disaster at a nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. [...]

In scientific terms there was no fallout involved in the disaster at Jonestown. [...]

(9:54.) Natural disasters possess the great rousing energy of powers unleashed, of nature escaping man’s discipline, and by their very characteristics also remind man of his own psyche; for in their way such profound events always involve creativity being born, rising even from the bowels of the earth, reshaping the land and the lives of men.

(Pause at 10:19.) As racial problems may be worked out on many levels, through a riot or a natural disaster, or a combination of both, according to the intensity of the situation on a psychological level; and as physical symptoms can be pleas for help and recognition, so can natural misfortunes be utilized by members of one portion of the country, or one part of the world, to obtain aid from other portions.

[...] The symptoms often seem to be inflicted upon the body, just as a natural disaster seems to be visited upon the body of the earth. [...]

Now: Natural disasters are brought about more at an emotional level than at a belief level, though beliefs have an important part to play, for they generate the emotions to begin with.

[...] These events can seem to be disasters or near disasters, and yet they can sufficiently mobilize the entire personality for survival’s sake. [...]

[...] In that light, and with that understanding, nature’s disasters do not claim victims: Nature and man together act out their necessary parts in the larger framework of reality.

[...] As I mentioned earlier (in Session 821), each person caught in either an epidemic or a natural disaster will have private reasons for choosing those circumstances. [...]

[...] Later in the book we’ll show how your individual beliefs attract you to joys or disasters. We will also discuss the ways in which mass beliefs will bring many of you together both in great periods of celebration, or as victims or survivors of disasters that seem to exist apart from yourselves.

[...] You might be a “survivalist,” setting up stores and provisions to be used in case of a nuclear disaster. It may seem to you that you are quite justified in protecting yourself and your family from disaster. [...]

Three friends and a story of disaster, though not that strong.

[...] An earthquake can be a disaster in the area where it occurs, even though its existence corrects imbalances, and therefore promotes the life of the planet. [...]

The physical eruption, while it may appear to be a disaster in the area of the disease, is also, however, a part of the body’s defense system, taken to insure the whole balance of the body. [...]

[...] If mass action against appalling social or political conditions is not effective, then other means are taken, and these are often in the guise of epidemics or natural disasters. [...]

(“Some indications of disaster, though this may be strong.” Humorously, Jane said the caricature of Don Wilbur could be called a disaster. [...]

Some indications of disaster, though this may be strong.