“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A belief must not possess. They were psychically adding to the unfortunate circumstances over which they argued, and both equally were at fault for this reason. A battle recreated in the mind reinforces the original psychic explosion and contemplation of war helps project that disaster into the future. To argue aggressively that war is wrong is ironic stupidity, for such an individual already displays those characteristics that lead to war.

There are deeply hidden areas of human behavior far below the surface of actions, and these cause the actions. They are psychic exchanges. Before the beginning of any war, subconsciously each individual knows not only that a war will occur, but its precise outcome. Battles like other physical acts exist first in the mental realm. When this realm is peaceful there are no wars. All of your physical activities, from the political to the economic and to the most insignificant individual concerns have their origin in mental existence, and their outcome is known.

(John Bradley is called Philip by Seth. Recently he told us that his territory might be changed, effectively cutting out Elmira and including instead an area of small towns in Pennsylvania. Since Seth goes into something else shortly, I will note here that John Bradley and Bill Gallagher engaged in lively argument here the evening before this session, on the subject of war.)

It is wrong to think that restraint under such circumstances or discussions is cowardly, though of course, it may be. To refrain from argument while simultaneously and deliberately forcing thoughts or pictures of peace, represents a positive action. The intensity of the peaceful images or thoughts unfortunately rarely match the intensity of the bitterness, you see. Thoughts of reconciliation or peace actually and practically do their bit to destroy the causes of war. Since Ruburt has somewhat come around, you may take a break and I shall continue.

[...] Some such individuals, model sons, for example, who seldom even spoke back to their parents, were suddenly sent to war and given carte blanche to release all such feelings in combat; and I am referring particularly to the last two wars (the war in Korea, 1950–53, and the war in Vietnam, 1964–73), not the Second World War.

(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. The information had even considered the consequences flowing from the intensified use of technology by the societies of the world after the war. [...]

(Pause at 9:59.) Give us a moment… This is not to be a chapter devoted to war. [...] 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. Many who entered that war feeling powerless were given advantages after it was over — incentives, education, benefits they did not have before it. [...]

When every young man refuses to go to war you will have peace. As long as twenty men insist on fighting a war you will not have peace. [...] As long as one person commits violence for the sake of peace you will have war. Unfortunately, in the condition in which your world finds itself, it is extremely difficult to imagine that all the young men in all of the countries at the same time will refuse to go to war. [...]

[...] For it will come when every man realizes that killing is wrong, and when every young man in every country refuses to go to war, and when he refuses to curse any man or any flower. [...]

[...] The accomplishments, wars, difficulties and institutions are all “after the event” — that is, they are outward actions of an inward existence. [...]

[...] Your beliefs (often as opposed to your desires) cause wars. [...]

A war is one kind of natural event brought about as feelings and beliefs interact on one level. [...]

[...] War always makes you less as a species than you could be. Women have shown uncommon good sense in not going to war, and uncommon bad sense by sending their sons and lovers to war. [...] In any war, both sides are fanatical to the extent that they are involved. I am quite aware that often war seems to be your only practical course, because of the set of beliefs that are, relatively speaking, worldwide. Until you change those beliefs, war will seem to have some practical value — a value which is highly deceptive, and quite false.

Presently you have a condition in which overpopulation is compensated for by wars (pause), and if not by wars then by diseases. [...]

[...] Wars are self-perpetuating because they combine both natural and unnatural guilt, compounded and reinforced by memory. [...]

[...] Thus the hatred of one generation of adults whose parents were killed in a war helps generate the next one.

[...] In the cases of both war and of overgrowth, the species has ignored its natural guilt. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Many thousands may die in a particular battle or war, for example. [...] These are victims of war, without question. [...]

[...] Wars are basically examples of mass suicide — embarked upon, however, with all of the battle’s paraphernalia, carried out through mass suggestion, and through the nation’s greatest resources, by men who are convinced that the universe is unsafe, that the self cannot be trusted, and that strangers are always hostile. [...]

[...] Religious wars always have paranoiac tendencies, for the fanatic always fears conflicting beliefs, and systems that embrace them.

In the Guyana affair, you had “red-blooded Americans” dying on a foreign shore (in South America), but not under a banner of war, which under certain circumstances would have been acceptable. [...]

(Seth’s comments re war and probabilities evidently mean that in his view Jane and I have moved into a probable reality where nuclear war will not happen. [...]

(Just before the session, we saw a newscast of a congressional committee in Washington, with some well-known scientists testifying as to the probable aftereffects of nuclear war—how the instigator would also eventually destroy itself even if the attacked never fired a retaliatory strike at all. [...]

[...] It now becomes apparent that a war, or near-war in one country is a threat to all others, and man’s consciousness at the level we are discussing is struggling to attain a planetary concern, a sense of life’s balances.

[...] No great idea would spread from civilization to civilization; no war would leap from land to land. [...]

There were wars before, and threats and disasters, but people in countries that were safe were not daily confronted with those other realities, so consciousness has taken upon itself this additional opportunity and burden, in that each person, largely speaking, is far more aware of events in other corners of the world—natives in deepest bush country have transistors.

[...] A great painting of a battle scene, for example, may show the ability of the artist as he projects in all its appalling drama the inhuman and yet all-too-human conditions of war. [...] In the same way, man is using his abilities, and they are apparent when he creates a real war.

In your wars you are using creativity to create destruction, but you cannot help being creative.

[...] Reading about a war in the middle of a quiet sunny afternoon is not the same thing as being in the war, however vivid the description. [...]

That intent may be confused, poorly executed, tangled amid conflicts of beliefs, strangled by the bloody hands of murders and wars — and yet no man or woman ever loses it. [...]

[...] Argue all you want against his works, as you read in your newspapers of errors, stupidities, treachery or war. [...]

(11:40.) To some people wars, poverty, murder, treachery, corruption, are primary experience, and must be dealt with — as requiring immediate action. [...]

1. According to Seth, then, feelings of powerlessness would have much to do with the especially high rate of violence — even to the death — among American servicemen who had once been prisoners of war. A government study of those who had been held captive in the Far East during World War II and the Korean War, for instance, shows that 40% of all the deaths that took place in the group between 1945 and 1954 resulted from murder, suicide or accident.

As for the war in Vietnam: over 500 American military prisoners were released by North Vietnam following the January, 1973, cease-fire. Officials now fear that a good number of these men will come to believe that their suffering was futile because of the war’s unpopularity in the United States. [...]

[...] 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. [...] The United States doesn’t want either Iran or Iraq to win their war. [...] 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. [...]

[...] 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). [...] 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. [...]

[...] 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.

2. “The killing in Iran continues—and hardly just because of that country’s war with Iraq,” I wrote in the opening notes for Session 936, in Chapter 11 of Dreams. Some three months later the killing goes on, and with even more ramifications of violence, intrigue, and power politics—involving not only Iran but that unhappy country’s neighbors in the Middle East.

[...] If you would end war, you must change yourself. It is the idea of war, then that you must fight.

Now, dear friends, there is never any justification for war, and there is never any justification for killing.

[...] That is why the abilities within your system are still working within the systems of war. [...]

[...] Thought, you may say, will not stop a war — yet what do you think started such a war? [...]

Despite all appearances, conditions of an exterior nature do not cause wars, or poverty, or disease, or any of the unfortunate circumstances apparent in the world. [...]

[...] For the first time the modern world realized its vulnerability to political events, and technology and communication accelerated all of war’s dangers. [...] For the first time, again, the species understood that might alone did not mean right, and that in larger terms a world war could have no real victors. [...]

[...] (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.

(To me:) Since your birth a probability has occurred that you could have followed, in which your wars did not happen. There is another probability in which the Second World War ended in nuclear destruction, and you did not enter that one either. [...]

(I’m sure that Jane tires of hearing me periodically rehash views that the species has engaged in at least three major wars in a little more than half a century, plus a number of “smaller” ones. [...]

[...] No one can deny that a war fought by dreaming men, at specified times, would be less harmful than a physical war, to return to my flight of fancy.

If I may indulge in a fantasy, theoretically you could indeed imagine a massive experiment in dream therapy, where wars were fought by the sleeping and not by the waking nations. [...]

[...] Despite the perhaps deplorable conditions being televised—whether of wars, massacres, graft, or whatever—the great inventiveness of man’s mind is responsible for that technological achievement. [...]

[...] The massacre of the Jews in the Second World War, in the numbers that existed, would not happen now, for the eyes of the world could not be kept out now, as they were then.

The selected newscasts shown in theatres in the Second World War were quite censored, but the aggressive press and its corps do now indeed serve in their own way as an invisible “police force.” [...]

Some people encounter war directly, however, in terms of hand-to-hand combat, or bombing. [...] In the deepest meaning there is no such thing as a victim, either of war, poverty, or disease. [...]

[...] Wars, violence, disasters — these are obviously shared by many, and are a part of your shared psychological and physical environment.