“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ever since the accident to the nuclear reactor of Unit No. 2 at TMI, 31 months ago, the reactor’s great containment building and an auxiliary structure have been flooded with highly radioactive water. [It grew to be over eight and a half feet deep in the reactor building.] Utility engineers now have in operation a filtering system to decontaminate before storage the nearly one million gallons of water in the two buildings. The job is to take around nine months; the processed water will finally be disposed of in 1983; the filters holding the radioactive material will be trucked to facilities in Idaho and Washington State for testing and storage. Yet to come are the removal of the reactor’s cover, its damaged core, and the decontamination of the buildings themselves.

I’d never seen Jane hesitate for so many months over beginning a new project, as she had with Magical Approach. Usually she just plunged right into her latest creative inspiration, and that she hadn’t done so this time was to me a clear sign of her long-range, general physical-emotional state. I continued to reassure her [as Seth did also] after she’d finished Chapter 10, for I was deeply frustrated and concerned for her. There wasn’t anything else I could offer that she would affirm. As the weeks passed she denied more than once that she was depressed. Watching my wife over the years, I’d long ago come to feel that I was observing someone who was following a chosen course with incredible ability and determination. Nor is it contradictory of me even now to note that Jane’s path is quite in accord with her basically innocent, mystical nature—for her acceptance of her nature makes possible her explorations of it in her own unique ways. When she does mourn her impaired state, it’s still never with that tired old question directed at a supposedly unjust and uncaring nature: “Why me?” She just keeps trying to grapple with her challenges.

Now—

People want, then, to throw aside old structures of belief. They yearn, often without recognizing it, for the remembered knowledge of early childhood, when it seems that they experienced for a time a dimension of experience in which the unexpected was taken for granted, when “magical events” occurred quite naturally. They begin to look at the structure of their lives in a different fashion that attempts to evoke from nature, and from their own natures, some graceful effortlessness, some freedom nearly forgotten. They begin to turn toward a more natural and a more magical approach to their own lives. At such times the conserving elements in nature and in society itself do not seem as strong as they did before. Surprising events that were earlier covered up or ignored seem to appear with greater frequency, and everywhere a new sense of quickness and acceleration gradually alters the expectations of people in regard to the events of their own lives, and to the behavior they expect from others. You are in such times now.

(9:50.) Now: Ruburt is that kind of courier. There are many in all areas of life, and this involves not only an excitement on the part of your own species, but the same kind of curiosity and excitement on the part of other species as well. Again, most difficult to explain—but those connections that exist between all species and the environment are themselves affected. The horizontal communications stretch and expand to allow for later developments in terms of probabilities, for consciousness always knows itself in more than one context, and it is possible for nature to experience itself in ways that would seem to be most improbable when the properties of conservation and learning are at their (underlined) strongest spring.

2. The cleanup costs at Three Mile Island are now projected at more than $1.5 billion, and will continue to increase. Many government officials and private analysts now believe that if the operating risks associated with nuclear power generating plants do not ultimately shut down many of them, their economic dilemmas will. I don’t know whether the nuclear power industry in the United States will die, but it’s in great trouble: Various studies show that around half of the 90 reactors under construction could be replaced by more economical coal-fired plants, containing excellent pollution-control equipment. By the late 1980s power from those new nuclear plants will be 25 percent more expensive than it would be if generated from coal.

In a passionate, bloody series of events later in the seventh century, a split occurred in which the Moslem religion was divided into two main branches, the Shiite and the Sunni. Now Iran is ruled by the Shiites, and is religiously oriented; Iraq is ruled by the Sunnis, and is more secular and socialistic. Iranian leaders emphasize the religious aspects of the war, Iraq the ethnic. The rulers of each country have urged the citizens of the other to revolt against their leaders. There is much disillusionment in Iran over the excesses of the Shiite clergy. In Iran martyrdom is encouraged—at home, in the war, and in terroristic activity abroad. Iraq has been accused of using chemical warfare (courtesy of the Russians) against its enemy. The Moslem world, then, is hardly a monolithic entity; as within Iran itself, the myriad consciousnesses making up that whole framework are much too varied for that to be true.

Sometimes there is / no reply at all, as if /
my voice itself / turns into mist / or is lost in /
the waves pounding / until it seems / I am indeed /
abandoned, / separated from / some forgotten self /
who has gone elsewhere / without me, / so that the gulf /
between us / is so distant / that messages sent back /
and forth / now take so long / to reach me /
that only future / generations / of myself /
would be here to / catch their meaning.

And a rush of motion shifts / my dry wrists /
minute yet violent, / so that I startle (shudder) /
who have been / motionless so long. / The spidery shell that /
holds my heart / is lifted at one edge /
as if by a sudden wind / and coiled / dry tendrils /
of nerves and muscles / unwind themselves. /
My color changes, / my white parchment / skin turns coral, /
minute wrinkles disappearing. / My shape begins /
to fill out again / as I sense a / strange self returning… /
more swiftly now / mind-stroking / the giant waves /
of the unknown / mental sea.

Little by little / my strength arouses. / My muscles unravel /
which have been / folded tight, / saved for future use, /
and I sit up now / running brittle fingers /
through my sun-dried hair. / I say, “We went too far /
my friend. / From now on we’ll / have to go together /
just out as far as I can / walk or swim—or I’ll go /
mind-traveling with you. / But I won’t stay home /
alone again, / appliances turned down / halfway, waiting.”

“Nor will you have to.” / The voice is clearer now /
until it sounds / from my own mouth / (vibrant, loud) /
no longer distant. / We chatter half / the night together /
while I shake / the webs of remoteness /
from fingers and toes. / My shell / grew soft as a web /
then it fell apart / and was whisked off sighing /
in the morning / wind. / All around us /
the beach gathers the / precious images /
that leap up suddenly / in the dark, coming in with /
the tide that unites / the tides of the heart.

“Right now I just want / to stand up whole / and walk across /
the beach,” I said. / And arm in arm / we did, /
smiling our double-single smile.

I cherished Jane’s ending for her poem, for in it she’d reaffirmed at least the possibility of her self healing itself. Yet, my hope was tempered even as my fear lessened, for she hadn’t mentioned outright the integration of a more understanding sinful self into her psyche. Jane’s physical challenges, her symptoms, are with her now, I thought, and we must deal with them on the way to rejuvenation. I was left caught as we talked after I’d read her poem: suspended between despair for my wife and the hope that she would choose to go on living, in our terms.

Very briefly: More so than Jane is, I think, I’m intrigued by and susceptible to nostalgia. I create a feeling for it. I used to equate the emotion with sentimentality—but leaving aside the basic merits of the latter, I’ve come to understand that nostalgia, growing out of its inevitable counterpart, memory, represents a facet of Seth’s idea of simultaneous time. For if past, present and future exist together (and continue to develop), then I see nostalgia as expressing a legitimate searching by the conscious mind as it seeks to grasp that the past exists now, and is not “dead.” The quest for nostalgia is one way to bring the living past up-to-date. The yearning I feel each time I drive past the apartment house Jane and I lived in for 15 years, just west of the business section of Elmira, represents my conscious reunification of the past with the present, and even a projection of both into the future in ordinary terms.

When I look up at those three high, old-fashioned bay windows that illuminate the living room of Apartment 4, on the second floor of that house, I visualize Jane sitting behind them at her oak table, thinking and writing, intrigued and comforted by the busy patterns of people and automobiles traversing the intersection she looks down upon: Walnut and West Water Streets. And behind those windows, at night in that living room, she paces back and forth for hours at a time after she begins to speak for Seth in December 1963. She holds ESP classes there. Accordingly, then, a Jane Roberts Butts and a Robert F. Butts live in that apartment I’m creating. I think my nostalgia for those days reinforces our activities in larger realms of consciousness, as well as in our “present” joint reality, in which my wife is now chair-bound.

“Now: It is the effortlessness, the spontaneous relaxation, that worries Ruburt, in that it is not specifically decided upon at any given point, but seems to happen by itself.