“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 3:50 PM Jane told me that she’d just received from Seth a definition of cults. She repeated it as best she could: “....a closed, emotionally charged mental environment, in which the characteristics of individuality were purposefully undermined.” Then a little later she picked up some more material while doing her exercises. Some of it drew a comparison between the paranoid individual, and an organization that contained the same ideas. The individual would be called ill for thinking the world was against him, but the organization’s similar beliefs would be more unthinkingly accepted because of its sheer size and power in the society.

In closed mental environments such expression is vigorously denied, and the very foundations of selfhood are attacked. 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.

Such systems distort the very nature of idealism by placing the ideal in such an exalted position that it can never be attained, for by giving up the self you have you are to attain instead a wholly pure, wholly loving, idealized, spiritual self. This self will love each other fellow being without reservations, distinctions, or judgment. This self is to miraculously appear as the old self is annihilated. The “annihilation” is accomplished by turning the will over to the authority. To act contrary to your own wishes or inclinations is considered a virtue. You are told not to make decisions, and to give yourself completely to the system of the cult.