“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I wrote quite a bit in Mass Events about our publishing activities, just to show for the record how complicated certain aspects of the creative life can be as we juggled sessions, manuscripts, proofreading, and deadlines [to list a few of our endeavors]; we “worked” at any time of the day or night—which didn’t bother us at all. Since a lot of that kind of information was presented in Mass Events, Jane and I don’t intend for much of it in Dreams. Rather, after indicating in this Preface the continuity between the two books, I’ll discuss briefly a few other subjects we feel deeply about. All of them are related to our work with the Seth material and Mass Events, however, and will, I’m sure, be reflected in Dreams. Beyond that, I have little idea of how many notes of Jane’s and mine, or quotations from nonbook sessions, for example, we’ll be adding to this book.

In Mass Events, along with TMI Seth had discussed the tragedy of Jonestown—where in November 1978 over 900 Americans had died [by murder or suicide] for a religious cause in faraway Guyana, South America. Last night I realized that in these notes for Dreams I also wanted to refer to the religious revolution in Iran while reminding the reader of the events in Jonestown. For to me, and to Jane also, I’m sure, Three Mile Island and Jonestown-Iran represent powerful extremes or directions in large-scale human behavior: certain aspects of religion and science seemingly at opposite poles of the human psyche, as it were.

Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic orientation is directly opposed to the secular or worldly view of government espoused in Western lands. Horrendous as the situation at Jonestown turned out to be, with religious fanaticism furnishing a framework for all of those deaths, I think it obvious that developments in Iran are already far more serious. Iran is an entire country, whereas Jonestown was one fragile settlement confined within the jungles of an alien land. Iran can “infect” other nations or peoples with an ancient religious force, or consciousness, if allowed to do so. Nuclear power can do the same thing with a new scientific force that can be even more devastating if not carefully “controlled” [in our terms]. To Jane and me these particular aspects of science and religion represent the way large-scale events can escape their well-meaning creators and literally take on lives of their own. And really, I thought, it could have hardly been an accident on consciousness’s part that as the events at tiny Jonestown receded from world attention, the revolution in Iran began to dramatically increase. To me the religious correlations are obvious.

The religious and scientific mass consciousnesses released in Iran and the United States respectively reach far beyond their countries of origin, obviously. Indeed, I think those attributes of All That Is must have long ago formed strong portions of the psychic atmosphere that, one might say, encircles the earth and affects all below. Those forces or consciousnesses must also constantly replenish themselves: Iran’s religious leaders devoutly nourish their country’s hatred for the United States, while here at home no less than six separate teams or commissions have begun investigations—on private, state, and federal levels—of what went wrong at Three Mile Island. Many younger people [and not only in the United States] have become very fatalistic over the possibility of nuclear accident, or worse, war. Some even refuse to bring children into a world they believe their elders have created for them [in those terms]. And most older people avoid seriously considering what nuclear war would really mean for them, out of fear closing their minds to certain aspects of that psychic atmosphere.

In my opinion these are hardly predictions, but instead very conservative projections of already well-established phenomena: I don’t for a minute think that any country, let alone our species as a whole, will give up on nuclear power. Nor will Iran, or the United States, or a number of other nations, dispense with fundamentalist religion of whatever kind. I believe that those particular aspects of scientific consciousness and religious consciousness will be with us for a very long time, for in our chosen earthly reality a larger consciousness—and, ultimately, All That Is—has opted for much long-range exploration of those two closely related portions of itself. In our probability we can create both very transcendent and very painful portions of that dual exploration. I think those particular aspects of mankind’s search for answers will grow ever more powerful for a number of years, until their very excesses finally lead to their “evolution” into forces that are much more controlled and compassionate and understanding.

He believed in the specific nature of the creative self, so that it could only be trusted in certain areas. He believed he needed strong mental barriers as well as physical ones, set up against his own spontaneity. He is beginning to understand that the spontaneous and creative aspects of personality are the life-giving ones. They can and must be trusted. He knows now he does not have to slow down, and that relaxation leads to motion.