“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Enjoying the sounds of life in the mysterious nighttime, I intuitively understood that not only did I want to mention in this Preface the feelings Jane and I have about Three Mile Island as a technological and scientific entity, embodying man’s attempts to extract new forms of energy [and yes, consciousness, in our joint opinion] from the far more basic and profound quality Seth calls All That Is; I also knew that I wanted to indicate how the very idea of nuclear energy, as an attribute of a national focus, compared with the situation in the Middle Eastern country of Iran. Iran is undergoing a revolution of a strongly religious, fundamentalist-Islamic character. [Islam means “peace,” by the way.] The force of Iran’s upheaval makes the growing Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States seem tame indeed by comparison; therefore I want to concentrate upon the Iranian dilemma rather than the religious conflicts in our own country.

In Mass Events, along with TMI Seth had discussed the tragedy of Jonestown—where in November 1978 over 900 Americans had died [by murder or suicide] for a religious cause in faraway Guyana, South America. Last night I realized that in these notes for Dreams I also wanted to refer to the religious revolution in Iran while reminding the reader of the events in Jonestown. For to me, and to Jane also, I’m sure, Three Mile Island and Jonestown-Iran represent powerful extremes or directions in large-scale human behavior: certain aspects of religion and science seemingly at opposite poles of the human psyche, as it were.

Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic orientation is directly opposed to the secular or worldly view of government espoused in Western lands. Horrendous as the situation at Jonestown turned out to be, with religious fanaticism furnishing a framework for all of those deaths, I think it obvious that developments in Iran are already far more serious. Iran is an entire country, whereas Jonestown was one fragile settlement confined within the jungles of an alien land. Iran can “infect” other nations or peoples with an ancient religious force, or consciousness, if allowed to do so. Nuclear power can do the same thing with a new scientific force that can be even more devastating if not carefully “controlled” [in our terms]. To Jane and me these particular aspects of science and religion represent the way large-scale events can escape their well-meaning creators and literally take on lives of their own. And really, I thought, it could have hardly been an accident on consciousness’s part that as the events at tiny Jonestown receded from world attention, the revolution in Iran began to dramatically increase. To me the religious correlations are obvious.

If the hassles surrounding TMI have engendered forces of a scientifically oriented consciousness, then, certainly those in Iran have released a very strong religiously oriented consciousness. Religious drives of whatever nature are much more comprehensible to us than scientific ones: I think it quite safe to note that in ordinary terms our species began struggling with religious expression long before it began recording history. This year [1979], Iran has turned into a land in which all Western nations—but particularly the United States—have become anathema. Iran’s religious leaders actually run the country now, operating behind a weak secular and probably temporary government appointed by its Western-leaning and departed leader before he fled his country last January. [Now, looking tired and ill, he travels the world with his expensive entourage, looking for a safe place to live after leading 25 years of savage oppression in his homeland.]

Within the context of Islamic culture, law is intrinsically religious law; there is no real separation of state and church unless by force. Iran seethes. Many hundreds have died in bitter internal factional disputes. Under the clergy this year several hundred others have already been executed as Islamic law is enforced, and thousands more are to die. Last February some 70 Americans were taken hostage when a mob of Marxist-led Iranian fedayeen [or sacrificers] overran the United States embassy in Iran’s capital, Tehran. The captives were quickly freed by secular negotiators loyal to the Iranian clergy, but certainly that kind of virulent anti-Americanism can happen again. Our citizens began a large-scale evacuation of Iran by air, as did those of several other Western countries. The official and unofficial call has gone out from millions of Iranian throats to purge the country of all Western thought….

The religious and scientific mass consciousnesses released in Iran and the United States respectively reach far beyond their countries of origin, obviously. Indeed, I think those attributes of All That Is must have long ago formed strong portions of the psychic atmosphere that, one might say, encircles the earth and affects all below. Those forces or consciousnesses must also constantly replenish themselves: Iran’s religious leaders devoutly nourish their country’s hatred for the United States, while here at home no less than six separate teams or commissions have begun investigations—on private, state, and federal levels—of what went wrong at Three Mile Island. Many younger people [and not only in the United States] have become very fatalistic over the possibility of nuclear accident, or worse, war. Some even refuse to bring children into a world they believe their elders have created for them [in those terms]. And most older people avoid seriously considering what nuclear war would really mean for them, out of fear closing their minds to certain aspects of that psychic atmosphere.

In my opinion these are hardly predictions, but instead very conservative projections of already well-established phenomena: I don’t for a minute think that any country, let alone our species as a whole, will give up on nuclear power. Nor will Iran, or the United States, or a number of other nations, dispense with fundamentalist religion of whatever kind. I believe that those particular aspects of scientific consciousness and religious consciousness will be with us for a very long time, for in our chosen earthly reality a larger consciousness—and, ultimately, All That Is—has opted for much long-range exploration of those two closely related portions of itself. In our probability we can create both very transcendent and very painful portions of that dual exploration. I think those particular aspects of mankind’s search for answers will grow ever more powerful for a number of years, until their very excesses finally lead to their “evolution” into forces that are much more controlled and compassionate and understanding.

In our terms, then, it’s certainly foolish for scientists to expect that the peoples of the world are simply going to dispense with religion just because scientists want them to, calling them “deluded” or worse. It’s just as foolish for those who are religious, even though they outnumber the scientists by far, to expect most scientists to embrace religion, to surrender their agnosticism or atheism, to give up their mechanistic, reductionist views of life—their attempts to use a series of “logical” steps to reduce the human being, say, to his or her ever-lower components, right down to the atomic level. [God is, therefore, unnecessary.] And this, of course, even though the scientists cannot explain where the universe we know came from, or where “it” may be going. They can only speculate about such massive concepts via theories like the currently popular “big bang” origin of the universe, with all of its implied consequences, or through the much lesser-known “inflationary model.” Nor can scientists tell us, any better than the religious-minded can, what life itself is, or where “it” came from, or where “it” may be going.

How strange a desire to have in these days of scientific and religious turmoil, of computers and nuclear debate and space technology. It’s almost like trying to wish oneself back into an earlier, seemingly less complicated time. That, surely, would be an illusory goal! But no matter what we may accomplish as a species, or how far we may travel, in those terms we started out utterly dependent upon our earth, with its fantastic variety of resources and life forms. That sublime framework still exists for us in all of its great beauty, and I want to always return to it: We create our human version of it each day, and I think that even now we’ve hardly begun to understand what we are and have. I’ve come to believe that the predominantly outdoor life would give me a certain understanding of our temporal and spiritual worlds impossible to grasp otherwise, and that my painting would inevitably mirror that greater comprehension. Sometimes I simply yearn for that way of living. Of course, what I’m really stressing here is living the independent life as much as possible within our ever-more-complicated national and world cultures. But we all have our dreams.