“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I’d looked for the shape of a rabbit last night, hopping across the silent road like an upright shadow casting a shadow, as I’d seen one do the other evening. I didn’t see a rabbit, but I did hear a flight of geese approaching from the north above the cloud cover. And that growing cacophony, perhaps my favorite sound in all of nature, reminded me that I’d closed out Mass Events by writing about geese. 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. Because of a combination of mechanical failure and human error, one of the two reactors at TMI had come very close to a meltdown of the uranium fuel in its core. A potentially disastrous situation had developed, one that could have involved many thousands of people and several thousand square miles of land. It seemed incredible now that that accident had taken place only six months ago.

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.

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.

You (both) are studying the nature of creativity as few others have done or can do—and that is bound to make possible new creative frameworks, and to offer new solutions to situations that cause difficulty only within smaller frameworks.