In 1981, Jane Roberts/Seth published a book called The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. This book is one of the most intriguing and also one of the most baffling.
In the book, Seth talks a lot about epidemics and about Three Mile Island and the Jonestown Massacre, events that occurred while he and Jane were writing the book. In this era of instant communication and 24/7 news coverage, however, we can add some other mass events to this list: 9-11; O.J. Simpson’s flight in the white Bronco after the murder of his wife; the Columbine shootings in April 1999; the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting; the Oklahoma City bombing; Hurricane Katrina and the devastation to New Orleans in 2005; Hurricane Andrew in 1992; the Indonesian tsunami in 2004; the Haitian earthquake in 2010. Those are just the mass events that come immediately to mind. There are many more. But you get the idea. A mass event is one that thrusts itself into our consciousness and changes our private, personal realities in some significant way.
Yesterday shooting and deaths in Tucson, Arizona certainly counts as a mass event. On a synchronistic level, it’s disturbing.
First, the fact that the shooting occurred in Arizona is significant. The state has been in the news recently because of Governor Brewer’s controversial immigration laws (racial profiling) and her denial of health insurance through Medicaid to individuals who need certain types of transplants in order to stay alive. Brewer claims these cuts are necessary, even though they save just over a million bucks from the state’s annual budget. The death panels that Sara Palin and her ilk screamed about during the health care debate last year (they’re going to kill your grandmother!) are a reality now in Arizona–but not because of ‘Obama-care.’ Already, two of the hundred individuals who need these transplants have died.
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was outside a SAFEway grocery store to meet with constituents when she was shot at point blank range. (That one smacks of the dark trickster). The bullet went through her brain. Even though she has survived the surgery, only about five percent of individuals with this kind of injury survive. Yet, her surgeons are “cautiously optimistic.”
The federal judge who was killed – who simply dropped by as a show of support for Giffords after having gone to mass – was an immigration advocate.
The call for violence has entered the discourse of American politics in a way that is horrifying. On Palin’s Facebook page – since scrubbed – the face of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was depicted in the crosshairs of a gun. Glenn Beck called for the killing of filmmaker Michael Moore. Sharon Angle, the Tea Party candidate in Nevada in the 2010 elections, advocated that Americans exercise their “second amendment rights” against Obama’s “socialist agenda.” The second amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1791 and protects the rights of the American people to “keep and bear arms.”
From a Sethian perspective in the mass events book: “People die when they are ready to die, for reasons that are their own. No person dies without a reason. The mass world is formed as the result of individual impulses. They meet and merge, and form platforms for action.”
If we, as individuals, create our realities from the inside out, as Seth contends, then what does that tell us about the roles played in today’s events? Why did federal judge John Roll just happen to walk over to the gathering outside Safeway? Why was Congresswoman Giffords so gravely injured? Why was an innocent nine-year-old girl killed in these shootings? The little girl, by the way, was Christina Taylor Green, featured in the book, Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11. A baby born on the day of a terrorist act dies at the age of 9 during a terrorist act. Why would anyone choose such experiences, even at an unconscious, soul level?
Perhaps the individuals involved chose to be involved in these tragic dramas to bring collective attention to this culture of violent rhetoric that has grown even more vitriolic and excessive in the last several years. It’s not that human beings are flawed. “The quality of your lives is formed through the subjective realities of your feelings and mental constructions,” wrote Seth. “Beliefs that foster despair are biologically destructive. If mass action against appalling social or political conditions is not effective, then other means are taken, and they are often in the guise of epidemics or natural disasters.” Wakeup calls, in other words.
Perhaps Tucson – like 9-11, like Columbine, like all the other mass events through the decades – is one of America’s wakeup calls. Have we gotten the message – as individuals, a society, a culture, a planet?
Here’s Seth talking about the power of beliefs.
