“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Now there’s talk of evacuating up to a million people who live in the counties surrounding Three Mile Island. Some refugees have already reached the Elmira area, where we live, and upon checking a map Jane and I were surprised to see that we’re only about 130 airline miles north of Harrisburg. We’ve driven the much longer road distance comfortably enough in one day. “Strange,” I mused to Jane, “that of all the nuclear power plants in the world, we end up living that close to the one that goes wrong….”

(Our region is supposed to be outside the danger zone—yet we see conflicting newspaper reports about whether the prevailing wind currents would make us vulnerable to the aftereffects of a meltdown. Even now local civil defense officials monitor the air several times daily with radiological survey meters—equipment similar to Geiger counters. Jonestown was far away, remote in another land, I said to Jane, but the potential mass tragedy of Three Mile Island hovers at the edges of our personal worlds. The whole affair has a sense of unreal immediacy, because there’s nothing to see, and because I don’t think most people really understand the probabilities involved. It would hardly be a coincidence, I added, that the mass events at Jonestown and Three Mile Island took place within less than six months of each other, and that they represented the two poles, or extremes, of mankind’s present main belief systems: religion and science.

(Certainly we hope that as he continues with Mass Events. Seth will comment extensively on Three Mile Island, just as he’s in the process of doing about Jonestown. In fact, material on Three Mile Island developed in the session this afternoon—which is the main reason we decided to give these excerpts here.

(Early last Wednesday an ominous development began unfolding at Three Mile Island, the nuclear-power-plant located on an island in the Susquehanna River below Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It seems that through a combination of mechanical failures and human error, unit 2, one of the plant’s two nuclear reactors, overheated and discharged radioactive water into the river, and began releasing small amounts of radioactive gasses into the atmosphere. [The entire plant is idle, since unit 1 had already been shut down for refueling.] By now the situation is much more serious, however: There’s a chance of a catastrophic “meltdown” of the uranium fuel rods in the damaged reactor’s core—the worst possible accident that can occur in such circumstances, short of an explosion, and a kind that proponents of nuclear power have long maintained “almost certainly cannot happen.” If the meltdown takes place, spewing great clouds of radioactive materials into the atmosphere, several hundred thousand people could ultimately become casualties in one form or another.

[...] Federal nuclear safety advisors call the dilemma “stable,” and today the President visited Three Mile Island in an effort to reassure people — yet the chance of a meltdown of the overheated reactor core of Unit No. [...] On March 31, children and pregnant women were advised to evacuate an area within five miles of the plant, and today city and county civil defense directors in eastern Pennsylvania were given plans for a precautionary evacuation of everyone within a 25-mile radius of Three Mile Island. [...] And so the entire country — indeed, the whole world — waits to see what will happen at Three Mile Island,² a place not far at all south of where I comfortably sit writing these notes.

[...] 2. We want to offer his comments on Jonestown and Three Mile Island in the order received, even if they don’t always come through within the context of “official” book sessions. [...]

(“I haven’t had too much time to think of questions, but today we were talking about the relationships between Jonestown and Three Mile Island — how those two events stand for the extremes of religion and science.” [...]

[...] At the moment we’re sure of but one thing: A nuclear reactor meltdown, like that threatened at Three Mile Island, is just not acceptable in our society under any circumstances. [...]

(Now there’s talk of evacuating up to a million people who live in the counties surrounding Three Mile Island. Some refugees have already reached the Elmira area, where we live, and upon checking a map Jane and I were surprised to see that we’re only about 130 airline miles north of Harrisburg. [...]

[...] Jonestown was far away, remote in another land, I said to Jane, but the potential mass tragedy at Three Mile Island hovers at the edges of our personal worlds. [...] It would be hardly a coincidence, I added, that the mass events at Jonestown and Three Mile Island took place within less than six months of each other, and that they represented the two poles, or extremes, of mankind’s present main belief systems: religion and science.

(Certainly we hope that as he continues with Mass Events Seth will comment extensively on Three Mile Island, just as he’s in the process of doing about Jonestown. In fact, material on Three Mile Island developed in the session held this afternoon, which is the main reason we decided to give these excerpts here.

(Early last Wednesday an ominous development began unfolding at Three Mile Island, the nuclear power generating plant located on an island in the Susquehanna River below Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. [...]

[...] Somehow, after supper, we got on the subject of Seth doing a “quick book” about Jonestown and Three Mile Island, something that could be offered to the public very soon, instead of material that would show up in a regular Seth book a couple of years from now. We already had the perfect title for the book, one we’d jokingly originated following last Monday night’s session: Seth on Jonestown and Three Mile Island: Religious and Scientific Cults.

[...] The crisis at Three Mile Island has passed — or so the governor of Pennsylvania announced on television this morning. [...]

(The challenges — and fears — created at Three Mile Island will last for years, however. [...]

(Regardless of whether the events at Three Mile Island have resulted in any significant radioactive fallout so far, they have generated some disquieting fallout as far as Jane and I are personally concerned. [...]

1. A few miles below Harrisburg. Three Mile Island, with both of its nuclear reactors off line, or inoperative, sprawls on its island in the Susquehanna River like a wounded behemoth. [...]

The severity of the “event” at Three Mile Island has spurred antinuclear protesters into action in many areas of the country; and the proliferating state, federal, and industry investigations into the accident promise to generate a collective fallout of a kind that’s bound to have far more impact on the nuclear power industry, and society, than anything that’s come from the crippled plant itself so far. [...] We’re following the whole affair involving Three Mile Island with the greatest interest, and my clipping file on it grows daily.

(See Note 1 for my comments on TMI, or Three Mile Island.

[...] (Long pause.) When can the search for the good have catastrophic results, and how can the idealism of science be equated with the near-disaster at Three Mile Island, and with the potential disasters that in your terms exist in the storage of nuclear wastes, or in the production of nuclear bombs?

There’s plenty of action outside the Three Mile Island, however, with all of the investigations into the accident underway or planned. [...] And in all of this concern for safety there’s much irony: for Three Mile Island, and the people of eastern Pennsylvania, were saved not by the plant’s emergency cooling systems, but by nonsafety-related equipment that plant operators finally used to improvise cooling of the reactor’s overheated core.

(Once again, see Note 1 on Three Mile Island.

[...] 2, one the two reactors at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power generating plant, overheated and came close to a catastrophic meltdown of its uranium fuel. [...]

[...] Right now, we’re very much aware of all of the good things the people of our world are providing for us and for millions of others, every minute of every day — yet a certain portion of our joint interest in that “outside” world is also directed toward the situation at Three Mile Island, the nuclear power generating plant located some 130 airline miles south of us. [...]

(The latest, Jane and I gather from a variety of reports, is that Three Mile Island’s damaged reactor, Unit No. [...]

(I left my thoughts about Three Mile Island, and began to consider a closing statement about Seth finishing Mass Events as summer passed its zenith and prepared to blend into fall. [...]

[...] The short story referred to above was reported on a TV program about Three Mile Island: Jane and I caught a glimpse of, I believe, a local newspaper or magazine in the Harrisburg area that had printed a short story about a nuclear accident at that plant, on the same day that the troubles began at Three Mile Island. [...]

Look at your nuclear reactor troubles at the plant by Harrisburg (Three Mile Island). [...]

(I might as well use this opportunity to point up what I think is an obvious connection between the nuclear mishaps at Three Mile Island, and the mass suicide at Guyana [Jonestown] earlier this year. [...]

[...] Almost overnight, relatively speaking, his heart regenerated, and two years later he ran the 26-mile marathon.

[...] I’d also mentioned the status of Three Mile Island, however, the nuclear energy generating plant located some 130 airline miles south of us, in Pennsylvania. [...] A potentially disastrous situation had developed, one that could have involved many thousands of people and several thousand square miles of land. [...]

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. [...]

[...] 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.

After six months, then, Three Mile Island is still “a closed enigma,” as I wrote in finishing Mass Events—only now the costs for the repair and cleanup of its damaged reactor have been projected as being well over $1 billion instead of the $40 million to $400 million of just a month ago, and into many years of “time” instead of just four. [...]

[...] When we reached Troy, Pennsylvania, yesterday afternoon, some twenty-four miles south of Elmira, Jane told me she felt revitalized suddenly.)

[...] There are more “coincidences” involved than those Seth described tonight, none of them consciously known to Jane and me before the Sayre adventure: Mr. Markle is in a nursing home but a few miles from where we live in Elmira, and my mother spent her last days in a similar home less than 15 miles away; one of Mr. Markle’s children lives in Elmira, and is connected with a store Jane and I have visited; Mr. Johnson, of the real estate couple that conducted us about in Sayre, did sign painting and truck lettering as a younger man, as I did; he and I had several mutual acquaintances in Sayre, among them an older artist of some reputation — and now deceased — that we had known in our high school days; and so forth.

[...] Jane and I took our drive three weeks ago, on April 7. The town of Sayre is only 18 miles from Elmira, N.Y., where we live now, and it sits in the beautiful Pennsylvania hills between two smaller communities — Athens to the south, and Waverly to the north in New York State. [...] Although it’s close by as far as miles go, for me important aspects of it are far away in terms of years.

A particular five-mile journey. [...]

[...] All summer it had been limping along; it could not be driven more than 35 to 40 miles per hour without a strong vibration throughout, and any attempts at a higher speed seemed to be outright dangerous. [...]

While Seth was dictating The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, for example, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred; and had the affair turned into a disaster, our Chemung County would have been used to house refugees. [...] For that reason he examines the public arena, and devotes a good deal of material to Three Mile Island and to the Jonestown mass suicides as well. [...]

[...] Seth was discussing the Three Mile Island accident, but he left off book dictation for a while because we felt so badly, and gave us some excellent material on animal consciousness before and after death — because “tragedies” come in all shapes and sizes, and the most domestic events of our days offer Seth opportunities to comment on life itself.

[...] 2 at Three Mile Island overheated and approached a meltdown of the uranium-packed fuel rods in its core. [...]

[...] In the same way, other dreamers would simply check with the dreamers of other villages or tribes—perhaps a hundred or even more miles distant. [...]

[...] I think his material will certainly include many original insights into the whole subject of consciousness-and-energy in general, as well as into the role of consciousness in events like the accident at Three Mile Island. [...]

[...] Rick Stack was one of her students, with friends often making the weekly 400-mile-plus round trip from New York City to our apartment in upstate Elmira, NY. [...]

Sayre, a community of about 7500, only 20 miles from Elmira and just across the Pennsylvania border, is my hometown. [...]

Here the personality was born only fifty miles away, in space, from the earlier existence; and as the wife of a wealthy landowner, often drove through the very land where the small house still stood, with its farm.

[...] (Pause.) There is an historical connection with the village, or close area nearby; and not too far away a fort, a Roman fort, within fifty miles I believe of the town.

[...] She’s on a “creative high” with the latter.¹ The complicated events surrounding Iran and Three Mile Island continue to develop, as consciousness explores itself in those areas.²

[...] For example, there are intensities of experience that are interpreted in your reality as distance in miles.

You could perhaps change your own focus of attention away from the center, and theoretically see the room and its inhabitants; and yet still this distance that has nothing to do with miles would be between you.

[...] When I got to 330 Jane told me that Karina had been moved to a rest home in Wellsburg, a small community a few miles east of Elmira. [...]