“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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!