Sessions 845, 846

Mass Events, Session 845

Jonestown and Three Mile Island stand for the extremes of religion and science?

You are indeed correct, of course, and you are also dealing with the behavior of cults in both circumstances, each concerned with a closed system of belief, rigid attitudes, intense emotionally-charged states, and also with what amounts to compulsive behavior.

The Jonestown people thought that the world was against them, particularly the establishment, and the government of the country.  They displayed paranoiac tendencies.  The same applies to the scientists, who now feel that the cultural climate is turning against them, that people no longer trust them, so that they fear they will be pulled from high estate.

To some extent – a qualified statement – the scientists have become somewhat contemptuous of all who do not understand their language: the non-elite.  They resent having to get money from the government, from men who are not scientists, and they build up a false sense of comparative omnipotence in response – and that makes them less careful than they should be.  They feel misunderstood by the public now.

None of them want any disaster, and yet some of them think it would serve the people right – for then the people might realize that politicians do not understand science, and that the scientists should after all be put in control: “We must have enough money, or who knows what can go wrong?”

The scientific elite could of course present a probability in which a world was created [where] the common man could have little knowledge of its workings.  You actually have an excellent set of guards and balances in your country.  Now your TV dramas, again, systematically show your old Frankenstein movies just when your scientists are contemplating all kinds of experiments supposed to bring forth life.  Hardly a coincidence, for the mass minds of the people are able to make certain joint statements, and those statements are heard.

Session 846

The Jonestown disaster happened long after we began this book.  Just lately another event occurred – a breakdown and near disaster at a nuclear plant near Harrisburg Pennsylvania.  Now in my other books I have rarely commented upon public events of any nature.  This manuscript, however, is devoted to the interplay that occurs between individual and mass experience, and so we must deal with your national dreams and fears, and their materializations in private and public life.

In scientific terms there was no fallout involved in the disaster of Jonestown.  Yet there was of course a psychological fallout, and effects that will be felt throughout the land by people in all walks of life.  The Jonestown situation definitely involved all of the characteristics that I have ascribed as belonging to a cult.  There was fanaticism, a closed mental environment, the rousing of hopes toward an ideal that seemed unachievable because of the concentration upon all of the barriers that seemed to stand in its way.

Most cults have their own specialized language of one kind or another – particular phrases used repetitiously – and this special language further serves to divorce the devotees from the rest of the world.  This practice was also followed by those at Jonestown.  Loyalty to friends and family was discouraged, and so those in Jonestown had left strong bonds of intimacy behind.  They felt threatened by the world, which was painted by their beliefs so that it presented a picture of unmitigated evil and corruption.  All of this should be fairly well recognized by now.  The situation led to the deaths of hundreds.

The Harrisburg situation potentially threatened the lives of many thousands, and in that circle of events the characteristics of a cult are less easy to discern.  Yet they are present.  You have scientific cults as well as religious ones.

Religion and science both loudly proclaim their search for truth, although they are seemingly involved in completely opposing systems.  They both treat their beliefs as truths, with which no one should tamper.  They search for beginnings and endings.  The scientists have their own vocabulary, which is used to reinforce the exclusive nature of science.  Now I am speaking of the body of science in general terms here, for there is in a way a body of science that exists as a result of each individual scientist’s participation.  A given scientist may act quite differently in his family life and as a scientist.  He may love his family dog, for example, while at the same time think nothing of injecting other animals with diseased tissue in his professional capacity.

Granting that, however, cults interact, and so there is quite a relationship between the state of religion, when it operates as a cult, and the state of science when it operates as a cult.  Right now your cultish religions exist in response to the cultish behavior of science.  Science insists it does not deal with values, but leaves those to philosophers.  In stating that the universe is an accidental creation, however, a meaningless chance conglomeration formed by an unfeeling cosmos, it states quite clearly its belief that the universe and man’s existence has no value.  All that remains is what pleasure or accomplishment can somehow be wrested from man’s individual biological processes.

A recent article in a national magazine speaks “glowingly” about the latest direction of progress in the field of psychology, saying that man will realize that his moods, thoughts, and feelings are the result of the melody of chemicals that swirl in his brain.  This statement devalues man’s subjective world.

The scientists claim a great idealism.  They claim to have the way toward truth.  Their “truth” is to be found by studying the objective world, the world of objects, including animals and stars, galaxies and mice – but by viewing these objects as if they are themselves without intrinsic value, as if their existences have no meaning.

Now those beliefs separate man from his own nature.  He cannot trust himself – for who can rely upon the accidental bubblings of hormones and chemicals that somehow form a stew called consciousness – an unsavory brew at best, so the field of science will forever escape opening up into any great vision of the meaning of life.  It cannot value life, and so in its search for the ideal it can indeed justify in its philosophy the possibility of an accident that might kill many many people through direct or indirect means, and kill the unborn as well.

That possibility is indeed written in the scientific program.  There are plans, though faulty ones, of procedures to be taken in case of accident – so in your world that probability exists, and is not secret.  As a group the scientists rigorously oppose the existence of telepathy or clairvoyance, or of any philosophy that brings these into focus.  Only lately have some begun to think in terms of mind affecting matter, and even such a possibility disturbs them profoundly, because it shatters the foundations of their philosophical stance.

The scientists have long stood on the side of “intelligence and reason”, logical thought, and objectivity.  They are trained to be unemotional, to stand apart from their experience, to separate themselves from nature, and to view any emotional characteristics of their own with an ironical eye.  Again, they have stated that they are neutral in the world of values.  They became, until recently, the new priests.  All problems, it seemed, could be solved scientifically.  This applied to every avenue of life: to health matters, social disorders, economics, even to war and peace.

How did such scientific gentlemen, with all of their precise paraphernalia, with all of their objective and reasonable viewpoints, end up with a nuclear plant that ran askew, that threatened present and future life?  And what about the people who live nearby?