“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Right now, a week after it began to manifest itself, the situation at the crippled nuclear power plant near Harrisburg is still very tense. Small amounts of radiation continue to leak into the atmosphere. Federal nuclear safety advisors call the dilemma “stable,” and today the President visited Three Mile Island in an effort to reassure people — yet the chance of a meltdown of the overheated reactor core of Unit No. 2 still exists. We’re told that a radioactive and potentially explosive bubble of hydrogen gas, which has been preventing cooling water from reaching the upper portions of the control rods within the reactor’s fuel assembly, is now being very slowly and carefully vented into the atmosphere; this is a first step in the bubble’s planned dissolution. On March 31, children and pregnant women were advised to evacuate an area within five miles of the plant, and today city and county civil defense directors in eastern Pennsylvania were given plans for a precautionary evacuation of everyone within a 25-mile radius of Three Mile Island. Protection is being planned against looting, which, it is estimated, would begin “two to three hours after the evacuees are gone.” Local milk supplies are safe to drink, since dairy cattle are eating corn and hay that’s been stored for months, but no one really knows the effects of radiation on the unborn calves being carried by many cows in the plant area. And so the entire country — indeed, the whole world — waits to see what will happen at Three Mile Island,² a place not far at all south of where I comfortably sit writing these notes.

None of them want any disaster, and yet some of them think it would serve the people right — for then the people might realize that politicians do not understand science, and that the scientists should after all be put in control: “We must have enough money, or who knows what can go wrong?”

1. “Now, for example,” Seth told us this evening, “man deals with a kind of dual selfhood, in that he presently thinks of himself as an uneasy blend of body and mind. He identifies primarily with what I call a limited portion of his consciousness. That portion he equates with mind or intelligence. He identifies with events over which he is aware (underlined) of having some control.

“Man thinks of acts, for example, and acting and doing, but he does not identify himself with those inner processes that make acting and doing possible. He identifies with what he thinks of as his logical thought, and the abilities of reasoning. These seem to suggest that he possesses an elegant, cool separation from nature, that the animals for example do not. He does not identify, again, with the processes that make his logical thinking possible. Those processes are spontaneous and ‘unconscious,’ so it appears that anything outside of his conscious control must be undisciplined or chaotic, and lacking in all logic.

“Both religion and science are based upon such beliefs. Anything that happens spontaneously is looked upon with suspicion. The word seems to suggest elements out of control, or motion that goes from one extreme to another. Only the reasoning mind, it seems, has any idea of order, discipline, or control.

“Man is therefore set against his nature in his own mind, and he thinks he must control it. The fact is that man’s consciousness can indeed become aware of — aware of — those spontaneous processes. But he himself has largely closed the door of comprehension, so that he only identifies with what he thinks of as his rational mind, and tries to forget as best he can those spontaneous processes upon which the mind rides so triumphantly.