“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the Guyana affair, you had “red-blooded Americans” dying on a foreign shore (in South America), but not under a banner of war, which under certain circumstances would have been acceptable. You did not have Americans dying in a bloody revolution, caught among terrorists. You had instead Americans succumbing in a foreign land to some beliefs that are peculiarly American, and home-grown.

Beside the list given earlier [tonight], you have the American belief that money will solve almost any social problem, that the middle-class way of life is the correct “democratic” one, and that the difficulty between blacks and whites in particular can be erased by applying social bandages, rather than by attacking the basic beliefs behind the problem.

(Long pause at 10:14.) They finally retreated into isolation from the world that they knew, and the voice of their leader at the microphone was a magnified merging of their own voices. In death they fulfilled their purposes, making a mass statement. It would make Americans question the nature of their society, of their religions, their politics, and their beliefs.

(Last Friday, April 25, was day 174 of the taking of the American hostages in Iran. [...] As we ate breakfast early Friday, Jane and I were astounded by television news reports that in the predawn hours of the 25th, Iranian time, American commandos had failed in a very complicated attempt to rescue the hostages. Actually, our forces hadn’t come close to reaching the prisoners: Responsible were mechanical failures and two dust storms that the American helicopters had to struggle through before joining a group of transport planes at a remote airfield, code-named Desert One, in central Iran. [...]

[...] We mourn the dead servicemen and wonder how many more Americans—military people and hostages—would have been killed had our commandos penetrated to the American Embassy compound, and the Iranian Foreign Ministry, in the heart of Tehran.

1. I suggest that in connection with this note the reader review the 891st session for December 26, 1979, in Chapter 3 for Volume 1 of Dreams, where Seth referred to the American hostage affair as “a materialized mass dream.”

[...] Imagine this zealous and comprehensive orientation encountering the Russian and American world views (which in themselves oppose each other) at this time!

[...] The American response—generally, now, speaking—to Iranian emotionalism is to become still more self-righteously reasonable, cooler, more superior. The Iranian’s response to the Americans’ reason involves new outbursts of emotionalism and behavior that appear utterly irrational to the American view. [...]

(At 8 PM tonight ABC TV News had begun a three-hour dissertation on the whole American-Iranian-hostage situation, narrated by Pierre Salinger. [...]

[...] In the case of hostages and those in protective custody, a certain kind of enforced isolation is also bound to happen —and to some degree or another, the individual involved will display in certain areas the same kind of exaggerated postures between various portions of the self, as the Americans and the Iranians display in their behavior together. [...]

Think of the slides shown today (by Loren) of postcard Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, USA, home of conventional, American, Protestant values. [...]

[...] Sayre, however, generally now, represented the poorer man’s version of that American ideal, and it was from there that many of your beliefs and those of your brothers had their origins. [...]

[...] Americans have had a fine and often understandable disdain for what was thought of as the European gentleman, or even the literary gentleman, or the man who somehow or other did not have to “rub elbows with the masses.” [...]

Not to work at an ordinary job, or at a clearly defined occupation, has always had a tint of European decadence to Americans—and that is to some extent the result of the early Protestants’ attitude toward the wealthy, robed gentlemen of the late medieval, Roman Catholic Church. [...]

A combo, South American. [...]

([The Gallaghers:] “Several combos, but none South American.”)

[...] Spiritualism exists with such fervor in your country because Americans like the idea of a communication with the dead on an individual basis, minus the intervention of priests, and hence the pioneering spirit was early tuned to do-it-yourself séances and the like. Americans would explore the spiritual world as they pioneered the physical continent.

Now: Few people would see any connection between William James and Scott Nearing, and yet both were in their own ways peculiarly concerned with “the American soul.” [...]

[...] He revived within himself, and within others, the American pioneering spirit, with its distrust of government, its individualism, and its eccentrics.

The fact that these were Americans is indeed a shock, and a shock that will make religious Americans question the nature of their own beliefs.

[...] This had erupted in a mass suicide, involving over 400 Americans, in the community of Jonestown in what was formerly British Guyana, in South America. [...]

[...] We discussed the amazing facts that the American civilizations had existed for centuries concurrently with the European and Far Eastern ones, but with each totally isolated from the other. [...]

[...] But I saw similarities of course between those various news events happening in far portions of the earth today, and the thought that the American and European civilizations had existed for so long on the same planet, yet completely unknown one to the other.

—you have been reading about ancient American civilizations. [...]

[...] The American hostages were released Tuesday, January 20. [...]

As for Iran, I described how last February [1979] a mob of Marxist-led Iranian guerrillas overran the United States Embassy in that country’s capital, Tehran, and temporarily held prisoner some 70 Americans. I noted that such a situation could happen again—and it did: On November 4, Iranian students assaulted our embassy compound and took 63 Americans hostage; 3 others were imprisoned at Iran’s Foreign Ministry. [...] The Moslem militants released 13 of our citizens—5 white women and 8 black men—who returned home by Thanksgiving Day, but this time they kept in bondage the remaining 53 Americans. [...]

[...] Now if you happen to be Protestant, male, white, American, rich, and healthy, at least within the framework of your beliefs you can look at yourself with “clear” eyes. [...] You will notice that I added “Protestant” to our value system, as well as “American.” [...]

Here we have a system of belief in which it is wrong to be white, American, or wealthy, or even at all well-off in financial terms. [...]

[...] If it were not for television and technology and the official line of consciousness, you would not know of the fanaticism of Anita Bryant and our Miss America, American apple pie, good religion and all the rest. [...] Sexuality in your time means what is American. Is it American to be a football hero and a gung-ho male? Is it American to be a homosexual and love poetry or dancing or music or children? [...]

(Pause.) The American experiment with democracy is heroic, bold, and innovative. [...] Yet the dream is a vital portion of American national life, and even those who are unscrupulous must pay it at least lip service, or cast their plans in its light.

[...] In this century several issues came to the forefront of American culture: the exteriorization of organized religion, which became more of a social rather than a spiritual entity, and the joining of science with technology and moneyed interests. [...]

(In notes taken from discussion October 28, Bill said 1781 was when the Americans sailed into Nassau and were captured in Revolutionary War.)

This place is fairly modern, and fairly, it would seem, American by contrast to other places they visit, but only by contrast.

(Actually, I took a moment or two to toy with the idea of asking Seth to comment upon the affair in Iran with the 49 American hostages being held at the American embassy. [...]

[...] To save life, to save American lives. The intent to save American lives was certainly “good” — at the expense of the Japanese this time. [...]

(The next morning, Jane awakened with the title of a book in mind. The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher. She knew that it referred to William James — the American psychologist and philosopher who’d lived from 1842 to 1910 — and that a dream had been involved, though she’d forgotten it. [...]

Here we see purpose, strong intent, and despite the ins-and-outs with mood, and the youthful wandering, the same purpose to write, to express oneself, to observe, and to stand apart from the mainstream of American life.

It was you who suggested the ESP book, and you also early decided not to become a part of the American mainstream of life. [...]

In your society therefore the black race has represented what you think of as the chaotic, primitive, spontaneous, savage, unconscious portions of the self, the underside of the “proper American citizen.”

[...] Now all of this so far is from the standpoint of American and Western belief. [...]