“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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

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.