“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Each person seeks value fulfillment, and that means that they choose various lives in such a fashion that all of their abilities and capacities can be best developed, and in such a way that their world is also enriched. Some people will choose “defective” bodies purposely in order to focus more intensely in other areas. They want a different kind of focus. (Long pause.) They want to sift their characteristics through a certain cast. Such a choice demands an intensification. It is made on the part of the individual and on the parts of the parents as well, so that a certain group of people will relate to the world in a highly characteristic way. In almost all such cases (pause), such people will be embarked upon subjective issues and questions also that might not be considered otherwise. They will ask questions on their own parts that need to be raised, not only for themselves but for the society at large.

Historically, the animosity between Iran (which until 1935 was called Persia) and Iraq goes back to at least the seventh century, when Arabic conquests brought Islam to the area. A major difference between the two countries is that Iran is Indo-European, and Iraq is Arab. Mohammed, the founder of the Moslem religion, died in 632; conflicts over his successor led to an overall division of the religion into the Shiite and Sunni branches (although this is a simplification). But this great split is also a factor in the current challenges being explored by the two nations: Iran is ruled by Shiite Moslems, Iraq by the Sunni.

In just that one area on our globe, then, a group of consciousnesses has chosen to “evolve” into a number of religious and secular forces that are both internal and external as far as national borders go. Surely one of the larger, long-term questions those consciousnesses must be exploring concerns the confining aspects that very restrictive fundamentalistic interpretations of a certain religion must impose upon large population groups (which accept such conditions for their own collective reasons, of course). In Iran, for instance, present-day Islamic law reaches into and defines acceptable and nonacceptable behavior in every facet of individual and mass life—from the most explicitly sexual to that with the broadest social and national implications. Imagine this zealous and comprehensive orientation encountering the Russian and American world views (which in themselves oppose each other) at this time!