“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(It’s over! The crisis at Three Mile Island has passed — or so the governor of Pennsylvania announced on television this morning. That is, the threat of an “immediate catastrophe” from a meltdown in the plant’s Unit No. 2 nuclear reactor has evidently passed; engineers have dissipated the hydrogen bubble in the reactor’s core, but the core temperature is still considerably above normal, and children and pregnant women are still advised to stay out of the area.

(The challenges — and fears — created at Three Mile Island will last for years, however. Jane and I read that it will take up to four years and many millions of dollars to decontaminate, overhaul, and place the crippled reactor back in operation; the cost is given in incalculable estimates ranging from $40 million to $400 million. Some government officials say that the reactor may never see service again, that it may end up junked, or as a sealed mausoleum, a mute symbol of our nuclear age. [Nor do we know what fate awaits the plant’s undamaged Unit No. 1.] A current fear is that if and when cleanup operations are begun, the small and supposedly harmless amounts of radiation still seeping into the atmosphere may intensify. There’s much debate already about the “cancer deaths” that may show up in the local populace, since no one really knows yet just what a “safe” dose of radiation could be in such a situation. And above all, our energy experts maintain that the United States has traveled too far along the nuclear path to turn back now.

(I didn’t get carried away by the idea this evening, but I was certainly taken with it as we talked. Yet I could see that I confused Jane, for to make such a venture possible we’d have to change certain beliefs and values that are deeply rooted within us; especially those about personal privacy and our reluctance to “go public” with such topical, immediate material, instead of trusting that the Seth material will exert a meaningful influence in society over the long run. Also involved would be the instant criticisms we’d encounter. But I think the main portion of my enthusiasm stemmed from the frustration I often feel because much of Seth’s material will go unpublished at this time. This year alone, for instance, he’s already given a good amount of excellent information upon a number of nonbook topics — among them the interpretation of dreams; human, animal, and plant consciousness, and the interactions among them; human sexuality; viruses and inoculation; other realities he himself inhabits, and so forth. We’re sorry to think that such material will be shelved indefinitely, but there’s no room for most of it in Mass Events, and there probably won’t be in future books either. I do try to give hints and clues to some of it in this book, though, as I’ve done recently in sessions 841 and 844–45.

(Pause.) The Jonestown disaster happened (in November 1978) long after we began this book (in April 1977). Just lately another event occurred — a breakdown and near disaster at a nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Now in my other books I have rarely commented upon public events of any nature. This manuscript, however, is devoted to the interplay that occurs between individual and mass experience, and so we must deal with your national dreams and fears, and their materializations in private and public life.

(10:17.) How did such scientific gentlemen, with all of their precise paraphernalia, with all of their objective and reasonable viewpoints, end up with a nuclear plant that ran askew, that threatened present and future life? And what about the people who live nearby?