“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Within the context of Islamic culture, law is intrinsically religious law; there is no real separation of state and church unless by force. Iran seethes. Many hundreds have died in bitter internal factional disputes. Under the clergy this year several hundred others have already been executed as Islamic law is enforced, and thousands more are to die. Last February some 70 Americans were taken hostage when a mob of Marxist-led Iranian fedayeen [or sacrificers] overran the United States embassy in Iran’s capital, Tehran. The captives were quickly freed by secular negotiators loyal to the Iranian clergy, but certainly that kind of virulent anti-Americanism can happen again. Our citizens began a large-scale evacuation of Iran by air, as did those of several other Western countries. The official and unofficial call has gone out from millions of Iranian throats to purge the country of all Western thought….

The feelings Jane and I have for animals almost automatically lead us to associate at least some of the implications of Seth’s statement with another one he’d given earlier in Mass Events. I remember it equally well, and find it fascinating. In Chapter 5, see the 832nd session for January 29, 1979: “Nature in all of its varieties is so richly encountered by the animals that it becomes their equivalent of your structures of culture and civilization. They respond to its rich nuances in ways impossible to describe, so that their ‘civilizations’ are built up through the interweavings of sense data that you cannot possibly perceive.”

Remember here other material given about cellular communication, for example, and the vast web of intercommunication that unites all species. Of course animals can communicate with man, and of course man can communicate with other species—with all species. Such communication has always gone on. Man cannot afford to become aware of such communication at this point, simply because your entire culture is based upon the idea of the animals’ “natural” subordinate position. The men who slaughter animals cannot afford to treat those animals as possessors of living consciousnesses.

(Pause at 9:45.) [Animals] do not blame [human beings] for anything. If as a species you really found yourselves communicating with the animals, you would have an entirely different culture, a culture that would indeed bring about an alteration of consciousness of the most profound nature.

How strange a desire to have in these days of scientific and religious turmoil, of computers and nuclear debate and space technology. It’s almost like trying to wish oneself back into an earlier, seemingly less complicated time. That, surely, would be an illusory goal! But no matter what we may accomplish as a species, or how far we may travel, in those terms we started out utterly dependent upon our earth, with its fantastic variety of resources and life forms. That sublime framework still exists for us in all of its great beauty, and I want to always return to it: We create our human version of it each day, and I think that even now we’ve hardly begun to understand what we are and have. I’ve come to believe that the predominantly outdoor life would give me a certain understanding of our temporal and spiritual worlds impossible to grasp otherwise, and that my painting would inevitably mirror that greater comprehension. Sometimes I simply yearn for that way of living. Of course, what I’m really stressing here is living the independent life as much as possible within our ever-more-complicated national and world cultures. But we all have our dreams.