“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.

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.

(Long pause.) The most important aspects of individuality are those subjective characteristics that on the one hand distinguish each person from the other, and that on the other hand are each like sparkling psychological mosaics, giving separate, exquisite individual versions of that larger pattern from which mankind emerges. The security, the integrity, and the brilliance of each individuality rises in these terms from that universal genetic language, and also from the inner subjective universal language of dreams. There are great connections between the two, and both are spoken together.

In man, the probabilities of development are literally numberless. No computer could count the combinations of characteristics possible. It is highly important, then, that the species retain flexibility, and not become locked into any one pattern, however advantageous (intently)—and I am referring to physical or mental patterns. Within the framework of established specieshood, there must be every kind of leeway—leeways that are biologically activated, so that variances are constantly active. Those genetic variances may appear as defective or eccentric. They may appear as the handicapped. They may appear as superior characteristics of one kind or another, but they must be biologically stated as the variations from the genetic norm.

(Long pause.) Suffering is a human condition that is sought for various reasons. There are gradations of suffering, of course, and each person will have his or her definitions of what suffering is. Many people do indeed equate a certain kind of suffering with excitement. Sportsmen, race-car drivers, mountain climbers—all seek suffering to one extent or another, and find the very intensity of certain kinds (underlined) of pain pleasurable. You might say that they like to live dangerously.

While I admit that many people will not agree with me (smile), I know from experience that most individuals do not choose one “happy” life after another, always ensconced in a capable body, endowed by nature or heritage with all of the gifts most people seem to think they desire.

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

(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.

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!

From our viewpoint, it’s almost as though our country has become transfixed by its involvements in the Middle East. I even think that the dust storms the American helicopters had to struggle through to reach Desert One were not only symbols but conscious manifestations of our challenges there. The failure of our rescue mission represents another learning step as we grapple with some of the “modern” convolutions of religious and secular forces. Actually, the proliferations of consciousness on our planet are seamless: In those terms, the overall challenges are ancient indeed.

Here in Dreams Seth uses the uncertainty principle as an analogy (and an excellent one), meaning that as the positions and motions of elementary particles, say, cannot be simultaneously measured precisely, so our genetic qualities and their motions can not always be specifically determined. In Dreams he’s already said (in Session 909) that the human species has an “amazing interplay between genetic preciseness and genetic freedom,” and (in Session 910) that “your genetic structure reacts to each thought that you have, to the state of your emotions, to your psychological climate.” Choices and probabilities apply. Thus do we avoid genetic rigidity.