“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You have lived in a world in which you believed you must struggle to survive—and so you have struggled.

Nothing taught that you were creatures. I have been trying to lead you into a new threshold of perception, where the old myths of evolution can be seen as outmoded, ancient or forsaken castles amid a forest of beliefs—a forest that is indeed itself a magically formed one. (Very long pause.) The forest is the world of your imagination, surely, the imagination of your minds, and yet given force and power by the innate creativity that rises up from an inner world that represents much more truly the origins of man and beast. That world has been largely hidden by the camouflages shed by science and religion alike, but in your times the landscape began to appear so dark and threatening, so forbidden and alien to your own desires, that its end seemed all the more inevitable and swift.

I hope I have given you in this book a far more gallant and true picture, that represents the origin of your life, structure and being and thought. The inner world of reality, the world of dreams, presents a model of existence in which new energy, vitality, and being is everywhere apparent, ready to come forward to form new transformations, new combinations of energy and desire.

(Long pause.) The sessions on magical approach do indeed represent the most “natural truths” about the nature and structure of your world, to the extent that you understand them and put them into practice.

In a way our joint world came crashing down upon us on February 26, yet we continue to live amid the welter of our beliefs. Again and again in the notes for Dreams I’ve indicated how Jane and I tried to understand the probable reality we’ve created. With the hospital experience, I’m telling myself that if I can write about the storms of consciousness involving whole nations, I can certainly describe and reflect upon our own storms of consciousness. Jane and I must still have an unbelievable amount to learn, even though I think that in more basic terms certain portions of each individual’s reality are consciously unknowable. As Seth said three years ago: “Consciousness attempts to grow toward its own ideal development, which also promotes the ideal development of all organizations in which it takes part.⁹

Yet from the very day of the accident, this question has existed along with each step of the cleanup process, and will continue to do so: What to do with Three Mile Island, that enormously complicated human creation that now has its own consciousness, and that has in its own way exerted the force of that consciousness throughout our civilized world? To dismantle TMI seemingly would solve the “problem”—but only partially, for once born its consciousness will (like all others) continue to live. I repeat, however, that in this country no public citizen has been either seriously injured or killed in an accident at a commercial nuclear facility (as have a few workers).

It’s quite clear, of course, that the nations of the West, including that “Great Satan,” the United States, are, with Japan, keeping the fanatical Iranian mullahs (Moslem religious teachers) in power, so that their country will not be taken over by the Tudeh, Iran’s Communist Party; that most unwelcome development could place Iran under Russian domination. Iran’s economy is actually at a very low point because its leaders have squandered much of its already reduced oil income on the war with Iraq, and on revolutionary institutions and food imports, while devoting little to the nation’s long-term interests. There’s plenty of oil available from around the world; were the West to stop buying Iranian oil, the regime would quickly collapse. The United States doesn’t want either Iran or Iraq to win their war. In the grimmest of political realities, our side is using Iran to block Russian expansion into the Middle East, and is using Iraq to block Iranian domination of its other, weaker oil-producing neighbors. The Iranian-Iraqi war promises to be the bloodiest one in centuries between the two countries; the West is working for a stalemate that over the years will degenerate into “harmless” border clashes. And Russia continues its remorseless occupation and subjugation of Afghanistan.

The mixing of consciousnesses in the Middle East, then, ultimately revolves around the great overall clash of ideologies between the United States and Russia. At the same time, Iran’s mullahs want a continuing war with Iraq to help consolidate their total power; they do not want victorious, high-ranking military leaders back home from the front to challenge their undisputed power (as internal resistance groups like the Mujahedin-e Khalq are doing). Iran has become a totalitarian religious theocracy. I wrote in Note 3 for Session 936, in Chapter 11, that despite their egoistic orientations, ultimately Iranians bow to the ancient power of their religion, including the demands of martyrdom. They continue their revolution even with their shortsighted military and economic policies, the war, the assassinations of scores of their leaders, and their country’s isolation by the free world. They export terrorism with a vengeance. They hate both the East and the West. With equal fervor they demand the downfall of the United States, France, Russia, Israel, and Iraq, among other nations. And for their grimly creative focus of revolutionary consciousness they unabashedly take full credit.

Some ideas came to me as I was taking a walk late one evening during the days I worked on this note. “We don’t want it thought,” I wrote when I got back to the hill house, “that the overall consciousness of Iran is playing with the individual consciousnesses of its people, say, as with toy soldiers, setting its citizens up against the world only to have them knocked down. Nor would this be true of any other country. Rather, we want to relay to the reader that the great consciousness of Iran is made up of the individual consciousnesses of its people—that within that chosen national context the individual does have whatever freedom of creativity is possible. The mental and physical freedoms available will vary widely, according to time, nation, and history, but they will always be chosen. This is hardly new thinking. Indeed, it’s quite obvious, but it’s the best way I can put it into words at the moment….” Once again, I refer the reader to Seth’s excellent material on violence as quoted in Note 2 for Session 933.

I think the main idea we’re trying to bring to consciousness as a species is that we’ve chosen to move beyond the limits of the ordinary, safe world we’ve always created. Until the development and use (by the United States, no less!) of the atom bomb four decades ago, we could routinely kill each other while knowing that most of us, and our homelands, would survive. We’re still fighting our conventional wars, but now we have to face the threat of national or species disaster through the escalation of an “ordinary” war into one in which nuclear weapons are either accidentally or deliberately used.

Privation theory has for many centuries been a main tenet of theology: Evil is not a power in itself, but only the absence of good; it is not-good. Room is made for the existence of the devil, who rebelled against the God who created him and constantly inveighs others to follow him in choosing the not-good. I believe that the only devils we know are those we originate ourselves. Through privation theory religion has created unanswerable questions for itself as it seeks to explain man’s inhumanity to man. To me, privation theory is a beautiful example of how man projects his fears of the world he’s created out upon that very world. His focus is much too limited.

I don’t mean at all to put down everything we’ve created in our world, and to proclaim that Seth’s concept of All That Is is the magical solution that mankind has been searching for throughout his existence. I do mean to relate the self-created elements of our interior and exterior, individual and mass worlds to a larger whole of consciousness. It’s inevitable that we’ll grow. How we’ll grow is the question!

It should be obvious in this mere sketch that I’m groping for answers through which to understand Jane’s and my own joint world. I cannot make the words express my thoughts and feelings the way I want them to.