“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Because the proper detection equipment was not in place, government officials do not know just how much radiation was released into the Pennsylvania countryside 28 months ago [in March 1979], when the reactor of Unit No. 2 at Three Mile Island overheated and approached a meltdown of the uranium-packed fuel rods in its core. Federal and state agencies have announced long-term population studies to measure the effects—if any—of this radiation. Since 1925 scientists have been steadily reducing their estimates of what a “safe” dose for human beings really is, however, and many now believe that there’s no such thing as a completely harmless amount of even low-level radiation. Any such dosage would be in addition to the earth’s natural background radiation, which varies across our country and around the world because of altitude and other factors.

Six weeks ago in Tehran, the capital city of Iran, over 150 officials of the ruling Islamic Republican Party were killed by bomb explosions which destroyed their headquarters building. At first revolutionary zealots blamed the “Great Satan”—America—for the crime. They also accused Iraq, with whom Iran is at war, but it’s almost certain that one of the dozen or more Iranian underground revolutionary groups is responsible. [The most powerful one, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, for example, is a Marxist-based guerrilla organization of “People’s Crusaders” that espouses its own brand of radical Islamic republicanism.] The mass killing resulted in an immediate increase in the government’s campaign to eliminate opponents of clerical [Shiite] rule in Iran. Over 70 dissidents had already been executed by the time of the blasts; many others have been arrested since.

Then yesterday I read a long newspaper account of how the members of the Bahai faith in Iran are being severely persecuted by the government and the Shiite clergy. Why, I wondered as I began to read, are Iranians harassing a whole group of other Iranians in such unpleasant ways—really seeking to exterminate them? The hatred the Shiites hold for the Bahais is based upon a century-old, primitive religious zealotry. Even though they too worship but a single God and the Koran, the Bahais are too liberal, too heretical in their peaceful and progressive ways; they are called unpatriotic and secular; some Bahais are attacked, dispossessed, lynched or executed, it seems, every day.

Yet (remembering what I said about seeming contradictions), your dreams are also social events of a kind, and the state of dreaming can almost be thought of as an inner public forum in which each man and woman has his or her say, and in which each opinion, however unpopular, is taken into consideration. If you want to call any one dream event a private event, then I would have to tell you that that private event actually was your personal contribution to a larger multisided dream event, many-layered, so that one level might deal with the interests of a group to which you belong—say your family, [or] your political or religious organization—reaching “outward” to the realm of national government and world affairs. (Pause.) As your private conscious life is lived in a community setting of one kind or another as a rule, so do your dreams take place in the same context, so that as you dream for yourself, to some extent you also dream for your own family, for your community, and for the world.