“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Many people lost their lives recently in the tragedy of [Jonestown] Guyana. People willingly took poison at the command of their leader. No armies stood outside the grounds. No bombs fell. There was no physical virus that spread through the multitude. There was no clothing to decorate the mechanisms of events. Those people succumbed to an epidemic of beliefs, to an environment [that was] closed mentally and physically. 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.

The people who died were idealists — perfectionists of exaggerated quality, whose very desire for the good was tainted and distorted by those beliefs just mentioned. For those beliefs must gradually shut out perception of good from experience.³

The parents have worked to give their children such advantages, and the parents themselves are somewhat confused by their children’s attitudes. The money and position, however, have often been attained as a result of the belief in man’s competitive nature — and that belief itself erodes the very prizes it produces: The fruit is bitter in the mouth. Many of the parents believed, quite simply, that the purpose of life was to make more money. Virtue consisted of the best car, or house or swimming pool — proof that one could survive in a tooth-and-claw world. But the children wondered: What about those other feelings that stirred in their consciousnesses? What about those purposes they sensed? The hearts of some of them were like vacuums, waiting to be filled. They looked for values, but at the same time they felt that they were themselves sons and daughters of a species tainted, at loose ends, with no clear destinations.

[...] Science’s flawed self still carries the same import, however, the idea being that while science does not deal with values, so its says, it misleads itself considerably in making such statements, for it projects the worst kind of values both upon mankind and the rest of nature—so even if you are not tainted from religion’s old beliefs, it is difficult to escape such ideas. [...]

[...] While you do not possess it in the same fashion, you are also tainted by it, picking up such beliefs from early background, and primarily from your father in that regard. [...]

[...] While he was tainted to some extent by conventional sexual beliefs, he still felt his own personhood in such a way that he gladly took advantage of characteristics considered feminine. [...]

[...] As a result, the reflection of sexual schism taints all of your activities, but most of all it limits your psychological reality.

You both chafed against the belief of your times, that man was a natural aggressor, tainted from birth, that he was damned by his very nature, condemned by his early childhood background, by original sin, or by his genes. At the same time you were also tainted by those beliefs, and seemed to see evidence for them whenever you looked into your selves, or outward to the world of your fellows. [...]

[...] How could a country be governed effectively by individuals who were after all chemicals run amok in images, with neuroticism built-in from childhood — children of a tainted species, thrown adrift by a meaningless cosmos in which no meaning could be found (very intently)?

In the public mind, it made little difference whether the devil or tainted genes condemned the individual to a life in which it seemed he could have little control. [...]

[...] The Sinful Self concept is a personal one for each who holds it, but it is also projected outward onto the entire species, of course, until the whole world seems tainted. [...]

[...] In my book we rather elegantly pinpointed those precise problems that have so tainted your world, and in God of Jane Ruburt made an excellent attempt to uncover the nature of the Sinful Self, and to outline the dilemma. [...]

In the world of religion, however, you are already tainted by original sin: “The mark of Cain” is symbolically upon your foreheads. [...]

[...] He decided early to have no children—but more, to fight any evidence of femininity that might taint his work, or jumble up his dedication to it. [...]

[...] He decided early to have no children — but more, to fight any evidence of femininity that might taint his work, or jumble up his dedication to it. [...]

[...] The Sinful Self then became very alert: how could it trust its own works, if it were so indelibly tainted? [...]

(Long pause at 9:02.) The Sinful Self shows itself in a period of transition from its religious to scientific format in science fiction or fantasy in particular, where you can almost trace the translation of religion’s self, tainted by original sin, to the Darwinian and Freudian concepts of the flawed self, bound to destruction one way or another, propelled by the unbridled unconscious or evolutionary defect. [...]

[...] On the exterior you broke conventions, but you were still tainted by conventional ideas. [...]

The idea of the tainted subconscious, however, left man no such relatively easy way out. [...]

You may believe that you have a right to health, and yet with equal intensity believe that the human condition is by nature tainted. [...]

[...] Man cannot mistrust his own nature and at the same time trust the nature of God, for God is his word for the source of his being — and if his being is tainted, then so must be his God.

[...] (To me:) While you do not possess it in the same fashion, you are also tainted by it, picking up such beliefs from early background, and primarily from your father in that regard….”

[...] Not that mediums, or others, couldn’t communicate with the “dead” — but to us, anyhow, exhibitions involving well-known personages usually seem … psychologically tainted. [...]

[...] The sinful-self concept is a personal one for each who holds it, but it is also projected outward into the entire species, of course, until the whole world seems tainted.