“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

MEN, MOLECULES, POWER, AND FREE WILL

(The regularly scheduled book session for last night was not held. We sat for it as usual, but became involved watching the last episode of a television mini-series about events growing out of the Watergate break-in.² While we followed the drama, Jane reported to me a steady flow of comments about it from Seth. More often than not he was quite amused as he gave them to her. She also picked up from him the heading of Chapter 8 for Mass Events: “Men, Molecules, Power, and Free Will.” We decided to reschedule the session for this evening.

Dictation: Next chapter (8). Ruburt received it correctly the other (last) evening: “Men, Molecules, Power, and Free Will.”

The President at the time, and through all of his life before (pause), was at heart a stern, repressed idealist of a rather conventionally religious kind. He believed in an idealized good, while believing most firmly and simultaneously that man was fatally flawed (loudly), filled with evil, more naturally given to bad rather than good intent. He believed in the absolute necessity of power, while convinced at the same time that he did not possess it; and further, he believed that in the most basic terms the individual was powerless to alter the devastating march of evil and corruption that he saw within the country, and in all the other countries of the world. No matter how much power he achieved, it seemed to him that others had more — other people, other groups, other countries — but their power he saw as evil. For while he believed in the existence of an idealized good, he felt that the wicked were powerful and the good were weak and without vigor.

He was as paranoid as any poor deluded man or woman is who feels, without evidence, that he or she is being pursued by creatures from space, earthly or terrestrial enemies, or evil psychic powers. Those poor people will build up for themselves a logical sequence of events, in which the most innocent encounter is turned into a frightening threat. They will project that fear outward until they seem to meet it in each person they encounter.

(Pause.) No one is as fanatical, and no one can be more cruel, than the self-righteous. It is very easy for such persons “to become [religiously] converted” after such episodes (as Watergate), lining themselves up once more on the side of good, searching for “the power of fellowship,” turning to church rather than government, hearing in one way or another the voice of God.

(9:03.) Through your mundane conscious choices, you affect all of the events of your world, so that the mass world is the result of multitudinous individual choices. You could not make choices at all if you did not feel impulses to do this or that, so that choices usually involve you in making decisions between various impulses. Impulses are urges toward action. Some are conscious and some are not. Each cell of your body feels (underlined) the impulse toward action, response, and communication. You have been taught not to trust your impulses. Now impulses, however, help you to develop events of natural power. Impulses in children teach them to develop their muscles and minds [each] in their own unique manner. And as you will see, those impulses of a private nature are nevertheless also based upon the greater situation of the species and the planet, so that “ideally” the fulfillment of the individual would automatically lead to the better good of the species.

(“As you learn to trust your natural impulses, they introduce you to your individual sense of power, so that you realize that your own actions do have meaning, that you do affect events, and that you can see some definite signs that you are achieving good ends. The idealized goal isn’t as remote, then, because it is being expressed. Even if that expression is by means of steps, you can point toward it as an accomplishment. Previously we distrusted our own impulses to such an extent that they often appeared in very distorted form.”

1. Almost two full months have passed since Unit No. 2, one the two reactors at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power generating plant, overheated and came close to a catastrophic meltdown of its uranium fuel. The situation at TMI is as enigmatic as ever, with the damaged reactor’s massive containment building sealed and holding within it large amounts of highly radioactive gasses, solids, and water. The contaminated water, some 600,000 gallons of it, floods the building’s basement in a pool at least six feet deep.

There’s plenty of action outside the Three Mile Island, however, with all of the investigations into the accident underway or planned. Scary stories abound about our nuclear dilemmas, ranging from tales of poorly designed plants, control rooms, and instruments, to the failure to promptly report potentially serious accidents, to the fact that in 1978 every one of the country’s more than 70 nuclear power plants had at least one unexpected shutdown because of procedural errors, mechanical failures, or both. The increasing dependence of the United States upon nuclear power is being deeply questioned, even though that energy is supposed to help alleviate our growing reliance upon foreign oil. There’s worry about the plants emitting constant radiation, and about their vulnerability to damage by sabotage, earthquakes, and — more likely — fires. There’s debate about who’s to pay for expensive nuclear accidents. Suits and countersuits are inevitable, processes that can continue for years. There will be fines and many tighter industry rules and regulations. And in all of this concern for safety there’s much irony: for Three Mile Island, and the people of eastern Pennsylvania, were saved not by the plant’s emergency cooling systems, but by nonsafety-related equipment that plant operators finally used to improvise cooling of the reactor’s overheated core.