“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Emir is Jane’s children’s book—or the one for “readers of all ages,” as she puts it. At the same time, Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor at Prentice-Hall, is trying to find out whether the Dutch edition of Seth Speaks has been published. He thinks it has. As soon as Prentice-Hall receives its shipment of books from the Netherlands, Tam will forward the copies due us. The German-language edition of Seth Speaks was published in Switzerland four months ago [in May], and just three weeks ago we received our first fan letter from that country. The author wrote in English, and her appreciation of the work Jane and I are trying to do is amazingly similar to certain letters we receive from readers here at home. Even if that initial response was slow in coming [partly because of the language barrier, we think], we were glad to get it, for it indicated a commonality of interest in human potential, regardless of nationality. We expect the same kind of response from those who will seek out the Dutch Seth Speaks. We know the mail from European readers will very gradually increase, just as it did after Jane published The Seth Material in the United States in 1970.)

Enjoying the sounds of life in the mysterious nighttime, I intuitively understood that not only did I want to mention in this Preface the feelings Jane and I have about Three Mile Island as a technological and scientific entity, embodying man’s attempts to extract new forms of energy [and yes, consciousness, in our joint opinion] from the far more basic and profound quality Seth calls All That Is; I also knew that I wanted to indicate how the very idea of nuclear energy, as an attribute of a national focus, compared with the situation in the Middle Eastern country of Iran. Iran is undergoing a revolution of a strongly religious, fundamentalist-Islamic character. [Islam means “peace,” by the way.] The force of Iran’s upheaval makes the growing Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States seem tame indeed by comparison; therefore I want to concentrate upon the Iranian dilemma rather than the religious conflicts in our own country.

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.

If the hassles surrounding TMI have engendered forces of a scientifically oriented consciousness, then, certainly those in Iran have released a very strong religiously oriented consciousness. Religious drives of whatever nature are much more comprehensible to us than scientific ones: I think it quite safe to note that in ordinary terms our species began struggling with religious expression long before it began recording history. This year [1979], Iran has turned into a land in which all Western nations—but particularly the United States—have become anathema. Iran’s religious leaders actually run the country now, operating behind a weak secular and probably temporary government appointed by its Western-leaning and departed leader before he fled his country last January. [Now, looking tired and ill, he travels the world with his expensive entourage, looking for a safe place to live after leading 25 years of savage oppression in his homeland.]

Jane and I try to keep in mind Seth’s ideas, as well as our own, concerning the great challenges our species has chosen to deal with these days, but I must admit that we often have trouble doing so. It seems to us that even if they privately agreed with us, our world leaders would have even more trouble implementing such thinking, for in their positions of “power” they’re quite locked into their national statuses by centuries of custom and history. To initiate truly original and/or revolutionary forms of beneficial governmental and mass behavior would be extraordinarily difficult.

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.

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.