“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Nothing taught that you were creatures. I have been trying to lead you into a new threshold of perception, where the old myths of evolution can be seen as outmoded, ancient or forsaken castles amid a forest of beliefs—a forest that is indeed itself a magically formed one. (Very long pause.) The forest is the world of your imagination, surely, the imagination of your minds, and yet given force and power by the innate creativity that rises up from an inner world that represents much more truly the origins of man and beast. That world has been largely hidden by the camouflages shed by science and religion alike, but in your times the landscape began to appear so dark and threatening, so forbidden and alien to your own desires, that its end seemed all the more inevitable and swift.

Jane hasn’t contacted a doctor. Her hearing and handwriting remain impaired. Her voice tremor and slowdown remain mild and intermittent; she’s done well during sessions. And as I write these closing notes I remind myself once again, as I often do, of those promises we made each other when we married in 1954—“that neither one of us would interfere with the other’s creative approach to life, no matter what resulted from the actions we individually chose…. Yet as the years passed I still had to learn the obvious—that Jane’s creative powers are inextricably a part of her whole approach to life, including her symptoms. How could it be otherwise?”⁶

I last discussed the cleanup at Three Mile Island, and nuclear power challenges in general, including safety and costs, in the opening notes for the 936th session, with its Note 2. That was almost three months ago, in November 1981; see Chapter 11. Lesser accidents, or “events,” as they are called within the nuclear-power industry, have continued to happen within the context of that primary accident at TMI—the loss of coolant for the nuclear reactor of Unit No. 2. I call the whole series of accidents “events of consciousness,” and think of them as unfolding in an orderly way from that initial large-scale event of consciousness, which took place on March 28, 1979. Early in January of this year (1982), for example, decontamination workers in a pair of buildings located between the plant’s two reactors triggered alarms when they inadvertently blew radioactive dust into the buildings from a drain filled with contaminated particles. The “unusual event” was not serious, although a small amount of radiation was released into the atmosphere through a ventilating system.

In Note 2 for the 936th session, I also described how the NRC had asked the operators of certain nuclear power plants to check for cracks in the vessel walls of their pressurized-water reactors, which are the kind installed at TMI. Now problems with corrosion are being announced. The reactor for Unit No. 1 at TMI is undamaged; it had been shut down for maintenance and refueling at the time of the accident to its twin, nearly three years ago, and a series of delays has kept it idle ever since. In February, again, company officials revealed the discovery of extensive corrosion in the bundles of small-diameter tubes in the two steam generators powered by Unit No. 1, which will delay any restarting of the unit for another six months to a year. The tubes circulate hot radioactive water from the reactor throughout the steam generators. Replacement of at least several thousand such tubes will cost millions of dollars; if engineers simply plug the damaged tubes, the reactor will operate well below capacity. (Steam generators at some other plants have a new problem: the accumulation of a corrosive sludge at their bases.)

The NRC is under a court order that prevents it from relicensing the start-up of Unit No. 1 at TMI until the psychological health of the communities surrounding the power station has been studied.

2. “The killing in Iran continues—and hardly just because of that country’s war with Iraq,” I wrote in the opening notes for Session 936, in Chapter 11 of Dreams. Some three months later the killing goes on, and with even more ramifications of violence, intrigue, and power politics—involving not only Iran but that unhappy country’s neighbors in the Middle East.

It’s quite clear, of course, that the nations of the West, including that “Great Satan,” the United States, are, with Japan, keeping the fanatical Iranian mullahs (Moslem religious teachers) in power, so that their country will not be taken over by the Tudeh, Iran’s Communist Party; that most unwelcome development could place Iran under Russian domination. Iran’s economy is actually at a very low point because its leaders have squandered much of its already reduced oil income on the war with Iraq, and on revolutionary institutions and food imports, while devoting little to the nation’s long-term interests. There’s plenty of oil available from around the world; were the West to stop buying Iranian oil, the regime would quickly collapse. The United States doesn’t want either Iran or Iraq to win their war. In the grimmest of political realities, our side is using Iran to block Russian expansion into the Middle East, and is using Iraq to block Iranian domination of its other, weaker oil-producing neighbors. The Iranian-Iraqi war promises to be the bloodiest one in centuries between the two countries; the West is working for a stalemate that over the years will degenerate into “harmless” border clashes. And Russia continues its remorseless occupation and subjugation of Afghanistan.

The mixing of consciousnesses in the Middle East, then, ultimately revolves around the great overall clash of ideologies between the United States and Russia. At the same time, Iran’s mullahs want a continuing war with Iraq to help consolidate their total power; they do not want victorious, high-ranking military leaders back home from the front to challenge their undisputed power (as internal resistance groups like the Mujahedin-e Khalq are doing). Iran has become a totalitarian religious theocracy. I wrote in Note 3 for Session 936, in Chapter 11, that despite their egoistic orientations, ultimately Iranians bow to the ancient power of their religion, including the demands of martyrdom. They continue their revolution even with their shortsighted military and economic policies, the war, the assassinations of scores of their leaders, and their country’s isolation by the free world. They export terrorism with a vengeance. They hate both the East and the West. With equal fervor they demand the downfall of the United States, France, Russia, Israel, and Iraq, among other nations. And for their grimly creative focus of revolutionary consciousness they unabashedly take full credit.

Even the damage that potentially can stem from a peacetime nuclear accident, as at TMI, can be great indeed. In Note 1 for Session 933, in Chapter 10 of Dreams, I speculated about nuclear energy being an earthly analog of the illimitable loving being of All That Is. Now I believe that it is. My conviction was triggered late the other night after I had been struggling with this note. I relaxed by watching a television travelog; I saw a great waterfall in an isolated jungle setting; the cameraman zoomed in on the foaming, surging water leaping at the base of the waterfall—and staring at that eruption of energy I suddenly realized the obvious: It’s not the force of any nuclear reaction that we fear, but the consciousness of the event. We must mature quickly enough to learn to “control” the contradictory potentials of the nuclear energy that we’ve helped guide into being. We have barely started to use that great power for peaceful purposes. I believe, then, that unwittingly we’re translating compartmentalized glimpses of All That Is through the extraordinary consciousness of nuclear energy. Isotopes of some of the elements involved with that energy have “half-lives” of millions of years—far longer, quite possibly, than our species will exist in those terms of time. Those reaches of time are so great, so timeless, that I see them as another earthly analog of All That Is.

Privation theory has for many centuries been a main tenet of theology: Evil is not a power in itself, but only the absence of good; it is not-good. Room is made for the existence of the devil, who rebelled against the God who created him and constantly inveighs others to follow him in choosing the not-good. I believe that the only devils we know are those we originate ourselves. Through privation theory religion has created unanswerable questions for itself as it seeks to explain man’s inhumanity to man. To me, privation theory is a beautiful example of how man projects his fears of the world he’s created out upon that very world. His focus is much too limited.