“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The last session we presented in Mass Events, the 841st, was held on March 14. On the 19th we received from our publisher for checking the proofs of the index for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, then two days later the proofs for the front matter of Psyche arrived. Going over these two sets of material was routine; nothing had to be returned, and in each case Jane called Tam Mossman at Prentice-Hall to give her approval and to make a few suggestions for changes. She’s worked each day at her third novel on the adventures of Oversoul Seven, and has heard often from Sue Watkins about Sue’s progress with her book on Jane’s ESP class: Conversations With Seth.¹ And with all of her other activities, Jane has held four sessions since the 14th: two personal ones, and two [842–43] on matters other than book dictation.

(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….”

Look at your nuclear-reactor troubles at the plant by Harrisburg (Three Mile Island). The entire idea of nuclear power was first a dream — an act of the imagination on the part of private individuals — and then through fiction and the arts, a dream on the part of many people. Instantly, probabilities spun out from that dream in all directions, vast potentials and dangers.

It was hardly a coincidence that this particular situation arrived in the social climate first of all portrayed in a movie.

Fundamentalists think of nuclear power as a force that God might use, say, to destroy the world. That event in Harrisburg means one thing to them. Some of the scientists equate nuclear power with man’s great curiosity, and feel that they wrest this great energy from nature because they are “smarter than” nature is — smarter than nature, smarter than their fellow men — so they read those events in their own way. The probabilities are still surging, of course, and in private and mass dreams people try out all kinds of endings for that particular story.

All in all, millions of people are involved, who will be affected of course to one extent or another.