“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(While eating supper this evening Jane and I watched the television reports on the series of devastating tornadoes that had struck northern Texas and southern Oklahoma — an area known as “Tornado Alley” — late yesterday afternoon. Over 50 people have been counted dead so far, with hundreds injured and many thousands left homeless. We’ve driven through some of the communities that were damaged. We talked about why people would choose to live in a region where it’s practically certain that such storms will materialize every year. Our questions would also apply to living in any dangerous environment on the planet, of course.

(Long pause.) In the past, and in large areas of the world now, many important decisions are not made by the individual, but by the state, or religion, or society. In this century several issues came to the forefront of American culture: the exteriorization of organized religion, which became more of a social rather than a spiritual entity, and the joining of science with technology and moneyed interests. Ruburt’s book on [William] James would be good background material here, particularly the sections dealing with democracy and spiritualism. In any case, on the one hand each individual was to be equal with each other person. Marriages, for example, were no longer arranged. A man no longer need follow his father’s vocational footsteps. Young adults found themselves faced with a multitudinous number of personal decisions that in other cultures were made more or less automatically. The development of transportation opened up the country, so that an individual was no longer bound to his or her native town or region. All of this meant that man’s conscious mind was about to expand its strengths, its abilities, and its reach. The country was — and still is — brimming with idealism.

1. A few miles below Harrisburg. Three Mile Island, with both of its nuclear reactors off line, or inoperative, sprawls on its island in the Susquehanna River like a wounded behemoth. Engineers are guiding the disabled reactor of Unit No. 2 toward a “cold shutdown,” the state in which the temperature of the water in the reactor’s primary cooling system drops below the boiling point, pressure is reduced, and the risk of a meltdown of the uranium fuel rods in the reactor core is eliminated. But it will be at least many months before the unit’s highly radioactive containment building can be entered for an assessment of damage. In the meantime, Pennsylvania’s governor has announced that it’s safe for children and pregnant women to return to the area.

The severity of the “event” at Three Mile Island has spurred antinuclear protesters into action in many areas of the country; and the proliferating state, federal, and industry investigations into the accident promise to generate a collective fallout of a kind that’s bound to have far more impact on the nuclear power industry, and society, than anything that’s come from the crippled plant itself so far. Jane and I believe that eventually this worst accident yet will be seen as a most fortunate occurrence, emphasizing — indeed, as it already has — the great dangers inherent in the growing worldwide emphasis upon nuclear power at this time. We’re following the whole affair involving Three Mile Island with the greatest interest, and my clipping file on it grows daily.