“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

By themselves, whether they appear as superior or defective conditions, they necessitate a different kind of adaptability, a change of subjective or physical focus, the intensification of other abilities that perhaps have been understressed. Yet granting all this, why, again, would some individuals choose situations that would be experienced as defective conditions? For this, we need to examine some human feelings that are often forgotten.

(Pause.) It is not unnatural. It is an eccentric (pause) behavior pattern. Many children daydream not only of being kings or queens, or given great honors, they also daydream about being tragic figures. They daydream of cruel deaths. They glory in stories of wicked stepmothers. They imagine, in fact, every situation that they can involving human experience. To an extent adults do the same thing. They are drawn to cinema or television dramas that involve tragedies, sorrows, great dramatic struggles. This is because you are alive as the result of your great curiosity for human experience. You are alive because you want to participate in human drama.

(10:05. “Well, I thought some of your material tonight, about focusing and bodily states, sounded like Jane’s own situation—her troubles with stiffness and walking.” Seth stared at me for a long moment.)

In Ruburt’s case, patterns of behavior were concerned—picked up for the purposes of intensification. Ruburt’s mother, and to a large extent your father, had some similar behavior problems. In Ruburt’s case, we are still dealing with functioning—impaired functioning—rather than genetic results. Tell Ruburt the end does not justify the means (with humor) in his particular situation, any more than in any other. The idea still is to love and protect and cherish, and express the body that you have.

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.