“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(10:09.) On quite a different level, riots often serve the same purpose, where the release of energy, for whatever reasons, introduces a group of individuals to the intimate recognition that highly concentrated vitality exists. They may not have found it earlier in their lives.

This recognition can lead them — and often does — to seize their own energy and use it in a strong creative manner. A natural catastrophe or a riot are both energy baths, potent and highly positive in their ways despite their obvious connotations. In your terms this in no way absolves those who start riots, for example, for they will be working within a system of conscious beliefs in which violence begets violence. Yet even here individual differences apply. The inciters of riots are often searching for the manifestation of energy which they do not believe they possess on their own. They light and start psychological fires, and are as transfixed by the results as any arsonist. If they understood and could experience power and energy in themselves they would not need such tactics.

(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.

Obviously, many riots are quite consciously instigated. Certainly thousands of individuals, or millions of them, do not consciously decide to bring about a hurricane, or a flood or an earthquake, in the same manner. In the first place, on that level they do not believe such a thing possible. While conscious beliefs have a part to play in such cases, on an individual basis the “inner work” is done just as unconsciously as the body produces physical symptoms. 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. Sudden illnesses are thought of as frightening and unpredictable, with the sufferer a victim, perhaps, of a virus. Sudden tornadoes or earthquakes are seen in the same light, as the result of air currents and temperature, or fault lines instead of viruses. The basic causes of both, however, are the same.

(11:29.) There was some racial tension, hints of impending riots that did not occur. A very capable mayor who had been in office for some time was defeated. Politics entered in, for many reasons not necessary to this discussion. Politically oriented people felt that they had no really strong hold, so that effective communication with the federal government could not be expected. In that area a sense of powerlessness grew.

(12:02.) Many in the religious community said that the flood was the will of God at that level, or that people were being punished for their transgressions. In its own way the flood was a religious event, for it united diverse groups of people — who did not always have the most humanistic of intents — with the community. In a strange way it also served to isolate certain portions of the people, and to highlight their predicament in a way that no riot could.