“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Nations, like individuals, go through cycles of emotional reactions. An individual may be swept by certain emotional patterns and then thrust them aside, and come under the influence of other emotional patterns, so nations do the same. Nations being made of individuals, overall problems are solved in a series of acts.

They provide crisis points. Your nation, because of its greatness and ideals, must judge itself accordingly against those ideals. It therefore cannot afford to judge itself against others, find itself superior, and rest. Such murders would have been taken for granted in some other nations. Those who point the finger now however know, in one respect, that they have the right to do so since you are the ones who have set forth the ideals of peace and brotherhood. It is against these, then, that you must judge yourself.

Strength does not come in national terms, real strength, by bullying aggressive stance. But it does come when the people within a nation are making an honest effort to bring about in physical reality the materialization of their individual and mass ideals. The best that is in them, whatever their point of development. The unity and strength is psychically recognized.

These mass killings are your nation’s way of pinpointing an extremely dangerous inner trend, that otherwise could have far more severe worldwide consequences. Obviously serious consequences result from these particular recent murders.

The nation served as an example of what could happen in any country if the most fanatical nationalism was allowed to go unchecked, if the ideas of right were aligned with might, if any nation was justified in contemplating the destruction of others.

[...] You do each create your own reality, however (intently), and en masse you create the realities of your nationalities and your countries — so at that time the Germans saw themselves as victors, and the Jews saw themselves as victims.

[...] (Pause.) All of the most morbid of nationalistic fantasies that had been growing for centuries, all of the most grandiose celebrations of war as a nation’s inalienable right to seek domination, focused finally in Hitler’s Germany.

[...] The nations of the world saw their own worst tendencies personified in Hitler’s Germany, ready to attack them. [...]

The worldwide view of man as a species, worldwide brotherhood, in no way hampers or endangers the individual man, and in no way endangers nations, but will represent one of the main hopes of mankind, without which no nations will endure.

In like manner, when the ego concept is discarded as a concept, as the concept of nationalism will be discarded, so the individual self will not lose but gain. The individual self will expand, as the individual man will be capable of expanding when the old idea of nationalism is finally overthrown, and he can be benefited through learning of, and cooperation with, other men as brothers upon your planet.

But as it is not wise to dispense with the idea of nationalism without gradual growths of understanding and preparation, and while the idea of nationalism cannot suddenly be dispensed with, so also the ego cannot be, and will not be, overthrown overnight; and even when it is finally left behind, it will still be used as a handy reference point; and through all this the self will not lose but gain, for all expansion outward, and expansion inward is a gain, and all boundaries, whether inward or outward, are hampering and limiting. [...]

[...] In a manner of speaking, the ego can be compared to the nationalistic state of nations, necessary indeed for man’s development, but already growing passé, and perhaps even mitigating against the survival of the species, where once it aided that survival.

[...] They comment clearly on issues that affect individual and private, and national or community behavior. The importance of impulses was stressed in particular, and the acceptance of such an idea is important to Ruburt’s recovery, of course—but also vital in the behavior of nations. [...]

(This week especially has also been one of emotional turmoil for us, and for many others, on the national scene: the inauguration of President Reagan; the freeing of the American hostages by Iran, and their return to this country in stages. [...]

Now: every individual alive is intimately concerned at certain levels with all of the national and global challenges in the political and social and religious arena.

[...] Those will appear in the private lives of citizens and in private dreams and in national events, or global ones, so that both arenas of activity are always intimately involved. [...]

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. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] Consider the following group of events as seen through a narrow window of ordinary time; consider the moral, economic, and diplomatic impact they have had—and are still having—upon our own national interests (let alone the interests of other nations). [...]

Ironically, as individuals and nations we talk about casting off old beliefs while cherishing them as long as possible. [...] Within our national orientations, within our religious and secular, scientific and artistic structures, we are choosing to go to the extremes of “good” and “bad,” and to deal with the consequences, all stewing together in what seems like an impossible mix of reason and emotion, learning and joy, pain and violence, and life and death. [...]

The belief is that if you frighten yourself badly enough through imagined projections and imagination, you will be frightened enough to change—but the nation or the individual following that method does not change for the better, but compounds the original condition, concentrates upon it until it looms larger than before. Such methods cause panic, national or individual.

[...] The approach unfortunately solves no problems, and only compounds them, whether the nation is trying to solve problems of energy, or social problems, or whether an individual is trying to overcome a dilemma.

[...] The way to solve a health problem, whether private or national, is to emphasize its existence, exaggerate its characteristics, and project into the future, and this is supposed to bring health.

For centuries it was taken for granted that God was on the side of the strongest, richest nation. [...]

This kind of syndrome can affect individuals, families, and to some extent entire nations. [...]

[...] Seth’s reference to the poor and nationalized health care referred to material Jane had picked up from him during the day; The poor were actually better off as they are now, without such a national health-care plan, for as it is they’re isolated from and immune to a number of ills they would start falling prey to if they could afford to pay for such treatment—that is, if the costs were paid for them. [...]

[...] The law, Prentice, health, the poor and nationalized medicine, our ideals—and start doing it from any point you wanted him to.”

[...] Ruburt was correct in what he picked up from me today (half laughing)—concerning both your rugs and nationalized medicine, and some of its effects upon the poor if it were established.

The “demons,” your projections, are then placed upon a national enemy, or the leader of another race; sometimes whole masses of population will project upon other large groups the images of their own unfaced frustrations. [...] As a man can be so divided, so can a nation and a world. [...]

The same applies then to nations. [...]

The person so involved must be extremely disturbed to begin with: up in arms against social, national, or religious issues, and therefore able to serve as a focus point for countless other individuals affected in the same manner.

In some cases, however, the constructed superbeing can deliver astute comments on national, social, or religious conditions.

[...] It is not the fact of the taxes so much that annoys you, as the uses of the taxes, for you resent “being forced” to contribute your money to what you think of as stupid national policies.

[...] It seems not only as money taken from you, or from Ruburt, which annoys you more, since you think he worked so hard for it—but worst of all, the money is being spent to promote national stupidities of distorted beliefs, to which you are diametrically opposed.

The money is being achieved or accumulated as a result of your search for the ideal, so it appears twice as ironic to you that the funds for taxes be used to pursue national goals bent, it seems, upon the most gross, shortsightedly practical conditions. [...]

[...] It preserves a quite necessary organization in which, overall, nationally at least, changes do occur for the better without massive disruptions.

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. [...] 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. [...]

[...] Now dreams also provide you with another universal kind of language, one that unites all peoples to one extent or another, regardless of their physical circumstances or nationalities or alliances.

[...] One of the complications I didn’t mention is Iran’s deepening confrontation with Iraq, another Moslem nation on Iran’s western border. [...]

[...] But this great split is also a factor in the current challenges being explored by the two nations: Iran is ruled by Shiite Moslems, Iraq by the Sunni.

[...] I thought the session, on the behavior of nations, excellent, and that San Salvador could almost be a test example of what Seth had talked about.

There will be more on your nations, for I will fill out the picture to some extent, and did not mean to imply that such people could not change—but that the changes would come in their own fashions, through their own characteristics as they blended, say, the helpful advice of others with their own needs and desires. [...]

[...] There would be no need to arm a nation in advance against another nation’s anticipated — but imaginary — attack.

[...] When they sleep, the waking nations add the day’s events to the world memory, and work out future probabilities.

Setting up such a global organization to study dreams, I told Jane, with some amusement, would probably require a decade of arguing among nations. [...] But, I said, imagine trying to win the cooperation of the nations of the world for such an undertaking! [...]

[...] Why, I wondered, couldn’t the nations of the world set up cooperative studies to verify its existence? [...]

The psychic groups, however, overlap physical and national ones. [...]

Generally speaking, America has not been a Sumari nation, nor have the Scandinavian countries or England. [...]

[...] We do have strong interests in national and world politics. [...]

[...] You have certain characteristics, in simple terms, as a family might have certain characteristics, or the members of a nation.”

(That one had been concerned exclusively with the Second World War, Jane said with some surprise, and had contained amazingly complete information on the war’s origins and the individual, racial, and reincarnational aspects of it as experienced by the peoples of various nations, whether or not said nations had been directly involved in it. [...]

[...] It is a sense of powerlessness that also causes nations to initiate wars. [...]

Give us a moment… Without going into any detail, I simply want to point out that in the United States strong national efforts were made after World War II to divert the servicemen’s energies into other areas on their return home. [...]

[...] (long pause).... that the tale of Israel, with all of its wars and so forth, and its historical and biblical past, represents some ancient brilliant knowledge that man once had, of the self being so diverse as to behave as a nation of a million individuals, each looking for their homeland. [...]

(Jane could also have equated the Israel nation with the large belief systems—involving hospitals and/or the law that she discussed in last night’s session.

[...] You project your sexual beliefs outward upon the nations, then, and often the terminology of the nations and of wars is the same as that used to describe sex.

You speak, for example, of domination and submission, of the master and the slave, of the rape of a nation — terms used in war and sex alike.

[...] It can convey the unique individuality of many different ceremonies, held by different nationalities through the centuries. [...]

[...] You have certain characteristics, in simple terms, as a family might have certain characteristics, or the members of a nation.