“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Today is Friday, January 23. The American hostages were released Tuesday, January 20. That day we watched the events on television. That night, all night it seemed, I was concerned with the hostages, uneasy, though I don’t recall actual dreams. The next morning we learn on TV that they’d been badly mistreated....

(Last night [Thursday] slept great. Again though all night it seemed I was involved someway with the hostages. All I recall was bewilderment that the world and everyone in it thought that the events were taking place now, while they weren’t in my time scheme at all. I think they were in the past from my viewpoint. The difference bothered me. Finally I decided that I’d just have to go along with the mass belief that the events were happening now and act as if they were, even if I knew better....

JANE’S NOTE ABOUT THE HOSTAGES

(Tomorrow, the hostages meet President Reagan at the White House. See my files for much material on the whole hostage question of recent months.

It may seem that nations behave only too impulsively, that for example the just-released American hostages were kidnapped as a result of highly impulsive behavior. [...] When you are a hostage you cannot express your own impulses, of course. [...]

[...] The captors then cut down on the freedom of the hostages by reducing the number of impulses to which the hostages could respond. [...]

[...] They use portions of themselves as hostages—or as in Ruburt’s case they use a portion of themselves not so much as hostages, but they take a part of the self under “protective custody.” [...]

(At 8 PM tonight ABC TV News had begun a three-hour dissertation on the whole American-Iranian-hostage situation, narrated by Pierre Salinger. [...]

[...] Some people take portions of themselves, again, as hostages, restraining such portions with the idea of punishing them for imagined wrongs, or for actions not understood. [...]

(Last Friday, April 25, was day 174 of the taking of the American hostages in Iran. [...] As we ate breakfast early Friday, Jane and I were astounded by television news reports that in the predawn hours of the 25th, Iranian time, American commandos had failed in a very complicated attempt to rescue the hostages. [...]

As soon as they learned of the rescue attempt, the furious and contemptuous leaders of Iran announced that they were dispersing the hostages around their country in order to block another such endeavor. In spite of their previous threats, however, the Iranians have not harmed the hostages in reprisal for the operation, and our Administration has strongly warned them not to do so. [...]

[...] Our government is supposed to have begun preparing for the rescue shortly after the hostages were seized more than five months ago. [...]

[...] On that same day—day 367 of the hostage crisis—Iran demanded a quick reply from the United States to its latest set of conditions for the release of the 52 American hostages. [...] Evidently Iran wants to bring the hostage crisis to an end because of the economic boycott the Western world has imposed upon it, because in January it will have to deal with a new United States president, and because of the military pressure being exerted against it by Iraq. [...]

Like the entire American hostage affair (in Iran), any physical event serves as a focus that attracts all of its probable versions and outcomes. The hostage situation (now in day 53) is a materialized mass dream, meant to be important and vital on political and religious platforms of reality, meant to dramatize a conflict of beliefs, and to project that conflict outward into the realm of public knowledge. [...]

2. Today is day 95 of the taking of the American hostages in Iran (on November 4, 1979). Any expectations that our country had of the hostages’ early release have long since dissipated. [...]

[...] I noted that such a situation could happen again—and it did: On November 4, Iranian students assaulted our embassy compound and took 63 Americans hostage; 3 others were imprisoned at Iran’s Foreign Ministry. Day 1 began of a countdown toward the release of the hostages (it’s day 30 as I write this note). [...]

[...] I thought of their daring raid to free their countrymen and women held hostage at Entebbe, Uganda, a few years ago; that event was also mentioned in tonight’s newscasts. [...]

(Actually, I took a moment or two to toy with the idea of asking Seth to comment upon the affair in Iran with the 49 American hostages being held at the American embassy. [...]

[...] The hostage crisis in Iran is a case in point. [...]

[...] We corrected those over the time our new president was sworn into office on the 20th, and the 52 American hostages were simultaneously released after 444 days of captivity. [...] At the same time, the hostages were “almost free” in Iran, aboard their plane taxiing into takeoff position at Iran’s Tehran airport. When our national anthem was sung I sat as though mesmerized, my eyes wet, hoping and praying [trite words!] for our country, for our defeated President, for his successor, and for the hostages. Then the hostages’ plane was in the air, flying toward Algiers, in North Africa.

[...] We followed the news accounts of the negotiations between the United States and Iran for the release of the hostages, and of the war between Iran and Iraq. [...]

That first, July 23rd entry at Three Mile Island took place on day 263 of the seizing of the American hostages in Iran. [...] Finally, on September 23 [day 325 of the hostage situation], the inevitable happened in the very unstable Middle East: Amid that explosive mixture of secular and religious national consciousnesses “at work” there, Iraq launched an outright invasion of Iran. [...]

[...] This little dilemma also pointed up some of Jane’s other reactions to remarks I would make, innocently enough, I thought, to the effect that Seth could do a great book on any number of current events—the latest being the whole hostage question. [...]

[...] These events must interact with each other on many levels: The revolution in Iran came to a head with a change of leadership in February 1979, after a ruler long favorable to the United States had been deposed; the accident at TMI took place in March 1979; the American hostages were taken in Iran in November 1979; Russia invaded Afghanistan at Christmastime 1979; and less than 10 months later Iraq invaded Iran. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] country, is pragmatic enough to join it in a very efficient exchange of large sums of money; these transactions, in part to settle business claims against Iran, are a portion of the arrangements made last January to free the American hostages.