“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

In your terms that language speaks the flesh—and it speaks the flesh equally in all races of mankind. There are no inferior or superior races. Now dreams also provide you with another universal kind of language, one that unites all peoples to one extent or another, regardless of their physical circumstances or nationalities or alliances.

Now I have often said that suffering of itself is not “good for the soul.” It is not a virtue, yet certainly many individuals seem to seek suffering. Suffering cannot be dismissed from human experience as a freak matter of distorted emotions or beliefs.

(Pause.) There are states of consciousness, one within the other, and yet each connected, of course, so that genetic systems are really systems of consciousness. They are intertwined with reincarnational systems of consciousness. These are further entwined with the consciousness that you recognize. The present is the point of power. Given the genetic makeup that you now have, your conscious intents and purposes act as the triggers that activate whatever genetic or reincarnational aspects that you need.

Over the centuries, in our terms, there have been numerous religious and secular (or worldly or nonreligious) consciousnesses at work and play in the Middle East. In Note 2 for Session 899, in Chapter 5 for Volume 1, I wrote that I could “only hint at the enormously complicated situation involving the whole Middle East these days.” I mentioned the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, on Iran’s eastern border, and how the coldly secular Russian philosophy clashed with the Iranians’ fanatical Moslemic orientation. I also referred to our own country’s entanglements in that section of the world. One of the complications I didn’t mention is Iran’s deepening confrontation with Iraq, another Moslem nation on Iran’s western border. Currently the two are arguing over territorial rights concerning a waterway between them that flows into the Persian Gulf; Iran and Iraq have exchanged border clashes for several months now, and each country has threatened heavier military action against the other.