“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.

The Jonestown people thought that the world was against them, particularly the establishment, and the government of the country. They displayed paranoiac tendencies. The same applies to the scientists, who now feel that the cultural climate is turning against them, that people no longer trust them, so that they fear they will be pulled from high estate.

The scientific elite could of course present a probability in which a world was created [where] the common man could have little knowledge of its workings. You actually have an excellent set of guards and balances in your country. Now your TV dramas, again, systematically show your old Frankenstein movies just when your scientists are contemplating all kinds of experiments supposed to bring forth life. Hardly a coincidence, for the mass minds of the people are able to make certain joint statements, and those statements are heard.

Ideas about conservation enter in as a result of my comments about alternate sources of energy, of course, and these are related to a number of deep desires that Jane and I have. We want our nation to embark upon programs to cut, and eventually eliminate for all practical purposes, its continually growing dependence upon foreign oil, for we see great risks in an overreliance upon that course of action; we think those hazards should be obvious to everyone since the oil embargo declared against us in 1973 by the countries of the Middle East. This excessive dependence can be done away with eventually, but at considerable sacrifice. Jane and I are more than ready to make those sacrifices; indeed, we live very conservatively even now. We can’t conceive of anything more worthwhile than to achieve an independence of spirit that’s based upon an independence of means, whether on a personal or national scale. But once it’s largely self-sufficient, the United States could really begin to fulfill its role of leadership in the world.

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.

“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.”