“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.

(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. It seems that through a combination of mechanical failures and human error, Unit No. 2, one of the plant’s two nuclear reactors, overheated, discharging radioactive water into the river, and began releasing small amounts of radioactive gases into the atmosphere. [The entire plant is idle now, since Unit No. 1 had already been shut down for refueling.] By now the situation is much more serious, however: There’s a chance of 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.

(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….”

One is that because objects just originate in man’s imagination anyway, there’s always a strong connection between objects and man’s dreams. They act as symbols of inner reality, so it’s only natural that whether he’s aware of it or not, man perceives objects in such a fashion that they also stand for symbols that first originate in his dreams.

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.

“Even if you don’t consciously remember your dreams, you do get the message. Part of it will appear in your daily experience in one way or another — in your conversation or daily events.

“Great discrimination is used to do that; for example, one newspaper item is noticed over others because a certain portion of that item represents some of the dream’s message. Another portion might come from a neighbor — but from the dreamer’s interpretation of the neighbor’s remarks, that further brings home the dream message. In such cases the individual will scarcely be aware that a dream is involved….

“You might dream of going away on a long trip by car, only to find that a tire blew when you were driving too fast. You may never remember the dream. One way or another, however, you will hit upon some kind of situation — a portion of a TV drama, perhaps — in which a tire is blown. Or you will see an item of that nature in the newspaper, or you will hear a story, told directly or indirectly about the same kind of dilemma. The magnitude of the physical stimuli with which you are surrounded makes it possible, of course, for any number of like situations to come to your physical attention during any given day. Even then, you might not recall the dream, but the situation itself as it comes to your attention might make you check your tires, decide to put off your trip, or instead lead you to inner speculations about whether you are going too fast in a certain direction for your own good at this time. But you will get the dream’s message.”