“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“I haven’t had too much time to think of questions, but today we were talking about the relationships between Jonestown and Three Mile Island — how those two events stand for the extremes of religion and science.” [See my comments on this double polarity in the opening notes for yesterday’s session.])

To coin a phrase, then, we see “fantastically great” lessons in the examples given us by Jonestown and Three Mile Island. We want our country and the world to benefit from those lessons, but at the same time we’re terribly afraid and concerned that our species won’t learn quickly enough. Jane and I want a sane world, in ordinary terms, and we want the freedom to explore every internal and external facet of that world. We want our world — our living world, the very planet itself — and every life form upon it, to exist in the greatest cooperative spirit possible, so that individually and collectively we can investigate what surely must be a myriad of still-unsuspected interior and exterior challenges.

“In the same way the scientific community speaks of grandiose ideals, of man’s triumph over the planet and nature. At the same time these ideals further divorce the scientists from daily practical experience with their fellowman; and since they see animals as objects, they’re bound to see human life in somewhat the same fashion. The sacrifice of, say, thousands of lives in a nuclear accident almost becomes justified in their minds if it is a means toward the grandiose goal of learning how to ‘triumph over nature.’ Again, this intent automatically turns them into mechanics.

“The scientist carries the burden of this alienation, and in his heart he must hope that his mission fails — for if it succeeds he will have effectively separated man from man’s nature in the world of beliefs, philosophically casting man adrift as meaningless psychological debris. Therefore, the scientific community often sabotages its own efforts.”