“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

GOOD AND EVIL, PERSONAL AND MASS BELIEFS, AND THEIR EFFECT UPON YOUR PRIVATE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

Heading for the chapter: “Good and Evil, Personal and Mass Beliefs, and Their Effect Upon Your Private and Social Experience.” Do you have that?

In this chapter we will deal with some current beliefs involving your most intimate behavior and social connotations.

The designations will make certain contrasts clear visually. I simply wanted to launch into the next chapter, and to make sure the visual aspects were clearly stated. (Pleased:) I will give you the rest of the evening off, therefore, as we are doing very well indeed, and will get to some beliefs not dealt with, of a social nature.

[...] The most private life imaginable is a very social affair. [...] The body, then, no matter how private, is also a public, social, biological statement. [...]

[...] The body is a spiritual, psychic, and social statement, biologically spoken. [...]

(Long pause at 10:05.) Cells possess “social” characteristics. [...]

[...] Communication implies a social nature. [...]

When physical conditions are adverse, such social traditions have often emerged. In times of overpopulation, so-called homosexual and lesbian tendencies come to the surface — but also there is the tendency to express love in other than physical ways, and the emergence of large social issues and challenges into which men and women can throw their energies. [...]

[...] Again, this would lead to a pattern too rigid for the development of the species, and give you too-specialized behavior patterns that would not allow you to cope as a species — particularly with the many varieties of social groupings possible.

[...] The male seems to perform better at mathematical tasks, and so-called logical mental activity, while the female performs better in a social context, in value development and personal relationships. [...]

[...] You cannot teach a boy to be “the strong silent male type,” and then expect him to excel either verbally or in social relationships. [...]

[...] Often such outbreaks take place after ineffective political or social action — that is, after some unified mass social protest — has failed, or is considered hopeless. [...]

[...] Yet, though each victim in an epidemic may die his or her own death, that death becomes part of a mass social protest. The lives of intimate survivors are shaken, and according to the extent of the epidemic the various elements of social life itself are disturbed, altered, rearranged. [...]

In some historical periods the plight of the poor was so horrible, so unendurable, that outbreaks of the plague occurred, literally resulting in a complete destruction of large areas of the environment in which such social, political, and economic conditions existed. [...]

[...] Literally, individual mental problems of sufficient severity emerge as social, mass diseases.

My viewpoint is, I admit, more cosmopolitan than yours, but your own inner knowledge is also far-reaching in those terms, and that knowledge can indeed be shaken loose from social confinement. You can often follow social mores quite easily, when you realize they are mores (intently), and not moral pronouncements—and that is all. [...]

(Pause.) The Roman Catholic Church seized upon art, inserted its own strong symbolism, provided art with a recognizable religious, social, and political value. [...]

[...] The ownership of land of itself provided not only built-in social status, but an entire built-in world of privileged beliefs. [...]

[...] Then what an outrage do you work against yourself when you try to justify your position in terms of money or worth according to the most parochial limits and social expectations of your time. [...]

There are many other conditions to be taken into consideration, for such diseases certainly do have strong social connections. They occur in social species. This does not mean that they are necessarily contagious at all, but that they do bear an overall relationship to the give-and-take between individuals and their social and natural frameworks.

(3:27.) A city might be overrun by rats, for example — a fine situation for the rats if not the populace — but the entire picture would include unrest in the populace at large, a severe dissatisfaction with social conditions, feelings of dejection, and all of those conditions together would contribute to the problem. [...]

Tonight’s session isn’t book dictation, but the large portions of it I’m presenting convey useful insights into our social behavior and social health—and as I show in Note 1, those states can include our interactions with animals.

[...] They are biological statements, literally social communications, biologically made, and they can be of many kinds.

[...] It is often used in a very strong manner in times of war, or great social upheaval, when people feel frightened.

(Pause at 9:17.) There are all kinds of biological reactions between bodies that go unnoticed, and they are all basically of a social nature, dealing with biological communications. [...]

We will have a relatively brief session this evening, for I would hesitate to disrupt what our friend anticipated to be a purely social occasion.

You may take a social break and I shall continue.

[...] Sometimes its members follow immediately after a revolutionary social change. [...]

[...] They are, then, often the founders of social systems. [...]

[...] They are organizers of energy, directed toward effective social structures. [...]

[...] They transmit “originality” without altering it, however, through the social structures.

[...] Social conditions are usually involved, so that an individual is, say, at the lower end of a poor social environment (pause), a seeming victim of it, or in a situation where his individual value as a social member is severely weakened.

Now: In the same way that a member of such a society can go [askew], blow his stack, go overboard, commit antisocial acts, so in the same fashion such a person can instead trigger the viruses, wreck their biological social order, so that some of them suddenly become deadly, or run [amok]. [...] To that degree they are social diseases. [...]

(9:38.) Give us a moment… The viruses in the body have a social, cooperative existence. [...]

[...] They are social. [...]

True individuals can do much through social action, and the species is a social one, but people who are afraid of their individuality will never find it in a group, but only a caricature of their own powerlessness.

Hitler preached on the great value of social action as opposed to individual action. [...]

[...] Fanatics call others to social action. [...]

[...] Then thought, nearly crying: I cut down desire—like loving to shop, and am afraid now to mix with people—then said Rob would help me there—in decent walking shape surely my attitude would be entirely different—so different it’s hard for me to imagine then to the importance that I make distinctions between the natural world; and the social or cultural one. [...]

[...] overreacted to my version of the social or cultural world as opposed to the natural one—where of course I fit in beautifully. [...]

[...] (Pause.) The more “civilized” man becomes, the more his social structures and practices separate him from intimate relationship with nature — and the more natural catastrophes there will be, because underneath he senses his great need for identification with nature; he will himself conjure it into earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods, so that he can once again feel not only their energy but his own.

[...] This often involved social divisions, for the impoverished were a mixture of blacks and “lower-class” whites. [...]

Locally you had a depressed region not yet in the kind of crisis situation that would draw great federal funds, and highly unstable social and economic conditions coupled with a sense of hopelessness.

(Pause.) Instead of a flood, disastrous social upheavals could have erupted. [...]

Of course, to some degree the condition involves you both in your social dealings with the world. [...]

In this neighborhood (gesturing), Ruburt’s symptoms were a social statement also to the neighbors at large in the new environment: better than a note upon the door, that neither of you were to be bothered, but ignored. [...]

[...] He can do far better, and the way to begin is to allow the spontaneous self as much freedom as he can in daily life, and to trust its expression—that it knows his psychic and creative needs, his physical needs, his social and financial needs, and all of these can be taken care of.

Flattery is no social crime. [...] Those who bang at your doors are the antisocial, the drifters, the troubled, or those so enthusiastic that they also ignore all social rules, in which case you two rise up in arms.

[...] They are socially oriented, dealing with lively discourse. [...]

[...] They are part and parcel of the social world.

[...] Seldom do they leave those social rituals.

Beside the list given earlier [tonight], you have the American belief that money will solve almost any social problem, that the middle-class way of life is the correct “democratic” one, and that the difficulty between blacks and whites in particular can be erased by applying social bandages, rather than by attacking the basic beliefs behind the problem.

[...] The villains consisted of the following ideas: that the world is unsafe, and growing deadly; that the species itself is tainted by a deadly intent; that the individual has no power over his or her reality; that society or social conditions exist as things in themselves, and that their purposes run directly counter to the fulfillment of the individual; and lastly, that the end justifies the means, and that the action of any kind of god is powerless in the world.

[...] They tried social programs, and found a curious sense of belonging with the disadvantaged, for they were also rootless. [...]

The psyche expresses itself through action, of course, but it carries behind it the thrust from which life springs, and it seeks the fulfillment of the individual — and it automatically attempts to produce a social climate or civilization that is productive and creative. It projects its desires outward onto the physical world, seeking through private experience and social contact to actualize its potentials, and in such a way that the potentials of others are also encouraged. It seeks to flesh out its dreams, and when these find no response in social life, it will nevertheless take personal expression in a kind of private religion of its own.

[...] Some of those sessions were devoted to our private beliefs, but usually Seth put such beliefs into the larger social context. [...]

[...] There were set rules for almost all kinds of social encounters and religious experiences. [...]

So your present experience is quite different than that of those forefathers who lived in the medieval world, say, and you cannot appreciate the differences in your [present] subjective attitudes, and in the quality, as well as the kind of, social intercourse that exists now. [...]

[...] Ideas and beliefs bring about those obviously man-made structures that imply self-conscious minds and the ocean of interrelated social events.

[...] There is often a great impatience with social situations, and unusual vitality. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Earthquakes are very often associated with periods of great social change or unrest, and from such locations the fault lines originate and are projected outward. [...]

[...] During break we speculated about what might be learned from a computerized global study — one extending back to the beginning of our recorded history, say — to see what correlations could be discovered between earthquakes and periods of great emotional and social upheaval throughout the world…. [...]

[...] There are certain social, peculiar niceties that are held in changing, shifting, sometimes meaningless patterns, to which I would not respond. That is, I simply would not be attuned myself to social situations or social transgressions, or what might seem social transgressions to you.

[...] To me the social entanglements and—ah—possible social disagreeabilities did not exist.

[...] Conceivably at times during a social evening several glasses of wine, under certain conditions bringing him quite naturally to the same sort of state that he goes through and passes beyond in these sessions, could lead him to misinterpret his data, or get his signals crossed.

[...] That is, while Ruburt drinks socially to some quite limited extent really, the fine balance of dissociation that allows our sessions to begin would not be possible, if for example our Ruburt drank more some evening than good sense would ordinarily permit.

You are social creatures, as the animals are. Despite many of your cherished, erroneous beliefs, your nations exist as the result of cooperation, not competition, as do all social groupings. [...] The comfort of social discourse represents one of the great building blocks of families and civilizations. [...]