“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

One of the tactics leaders in the West are still pursuing is to organize world opinion against the Soviet stay in Afghanistan and the war between Iraq and Iran. Jane and I think that both situations, furnishing as they do large-scale frameworks for the almost endless convolutions of consciousness, may persist for many years, with no formal resolutions materializing. Russia may simply annex Afghanistan as the years pass. Perhaps the Iraqi-Iranian war will subside because of the exhaustion of those countries. I speculated that the overall revolutionary and fundamentalistic consciousness of Iran is like a creative vortex, surrounded by other great national consciousnesses that are strongly resisting its policies for their own creative religious and political reasons. A look at a map will show what I mean: Iran has Iraq and Turkey on its western border, with Russia to its north and Afghanistan on its east; Pakistan lies on Iran’s eastern border also; south of Iran, across the narrow Persian Gulf, cluster the mix of large and small wealthy states on the Arabian peninsula. The Moslem Kurds of Iran and Iraq, minority peoples with strong roots in eastern Turkey, are rebelling against the military forces of their respective countries; and Pakistan has become a place of shelter for refugees from Afghanistan. That whole area in the Middle East, then, is a stew of emotions, actions, and consciousnesses.

The self becomes operationally scattered or divided, so that if one portion of it is attacked, the other portions can rise up in defense. Such persons use the various elements of the personality as spies or soldiers, scattering their forces (pause), and forced under those conditions to set up elaborate communication systems to keep those portions of the self in contact with each other. In times of stress, they set up an even greater isolation of one part of the self from another, which puts stress upon the system of communication, of course, so that it must be used constantly.

(Long pause at 10:08.) Give us a moment…. Remember, we are dealing with a scattered force, various elements of the personality sent out to do different tasks—and in a fashion they are caught between the superior self and the debased self. There is, then, no clear line for action to follow. It must also be camouflaged. Instead of clear impulses toward action that intersect directly with consciousness, you have bursts of impulses that emerge as orders to act, coming from another source, or from other sources. These may appear as voices telling an individual to do this or that, as “automatic” commands through writing, or as perceptions that would be called hallucinatory. In this way the individual need not take responsibility for such actions. They do not seem to be coming from himself or from herself. The terrible possibility of failure is there to that extent, in that situation, momentarily relieved.

(Seth added a few sentences of personal material for Jane, then ended the session at 10:40 P.M. Jane’s delivery had often been very animated and forceful, and I told her she’d done well. I was going to joke with her by asking if this was a “fill-in” session, but decided not to. I felt that except for our own time limitations, Seth could have given much more material on the whole subject of mental illness.)