“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Those questions help bring out psychological maturities and insights about the nature of the species in general. Many such conditions also serve to keep man’s sympathies alive. I make a distinction between sympathy and pity, for a lively sympathy leads toward construction, toward the utilization of abilities, even to social discourse, while pity can be deadening.

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!