“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last Friday, April 25, was day 174 of the taking of the American hostages in Iran. Until that day the 53 prisoners had been held at two locations in Tehran, the capital city of that very turbulent land. 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. By then three of the eight “choppers” were out of action. Since six of them were considered vital for a successful rescue, the mission was canceled at that point—but eight crewmen were killed when one of the remaining helicopters collided with a transport plane during a refueling attempt. The resulting fires and explosions could be seen and heard for miles through the desert night.

Many in the United States now feel that our country looks the fool before the rest of the world. The mildest epithet being applied to us in the Middle East is “stupid.” A few of our European allies, however, have expressed concern and sympathy. Our President’s main challengers for his office haven’t publicly criticized him, but neither have they defended him from foreign and domestic censure—and today our Secretary of State resigned in protest of the rescue mission. Our government is supposed to have begun preparing for the rescue shortly after the hostages were seized more than five months ago. All details of the failed attempt may not be released for months, or even years, but already critics are questioning whether the excessive secrecy surrounding the operation led to basic errors in planning and judgment, as well as poor anticipation of the mechanical factors involved.

Your overreliance upon physical norms, and your distorted concepts concerning survival of the fittest, help exaggerate the existence of any genetic defects, of course. Many religious dogmas consider such conditions, again, the result of a god’s punishment. The survival of the species is far more dependent upon your subjective activities than your physical ones—for it is your subjective behavior that is responsible for your physical acts. Science of course looks at it the other way around, as if your physical acts are the result of a robot’s mechanical, formalized behavior—a robot miraculously programmed by the blind elements of an accidental universe formed by chance. The robot is programmed only to survive at anyone’s or anything’s expense. It has no real consciousness of its own. Its thoughts are merely mental mirages, so if one of its parts is defective then obviously it is in deep trouble. But man is no robot, and each so-called genetic defect has an internal part to play in the entire picture of genetic reality. The principle of uncertainty must operate genetically, or you would have been locked into overspecializations as a species.²

2. Seth delivered the 823rd session for Mass Events on February 27, 1978—over two years ago. See Note 2 for that session, in Chapter 4, wherein I wrote that as a physical principle the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics “sets definite limits to the accuracy possible in measuring both the motion and position of atoms and elementary particles simultaneously,” and that “there is an interaction between the observer (with his instruments) and the object or quality being measured.”