“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This flexibility also generates some challenges, however, for the great amount of material we’ve accumulated during the Mass Events hiatus gave us the urge to see what we could do about getting at least some of it published, so that others could benefit. The problem — the challenge — would be to find the physical time to do the necessary editing and notes to put such a manuscript in shape for publication; this would be a job that could easily take a year. Jane and I considered combining that hypothetical book with Mass Events, but figured out that the resulting volume would almost surely be too long; longer even than Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, which in our opinion is bulky enough.

As I sorted through the mass of material Seth-Jane has produced these last weeks, I found myself once again charmed and mystified by the challenges contained in the art of writing. The painted image can be taken in at a glance, at any stage of its development, but the cognition of the written word takes much more time, no matter how fast one reads or absorbs new material. With a single look the artist has an immediate grasp of the entire work before him; he (or she) can tell what he’s done and has to do, what he may have to change or “fix up,” even if he fails at it. Not so the writer, who while reading must pass up the artist’s simultaneous perception for his own linear cognition as he makes a multitude of decisions involving sentence structure, what to use or eliminate, and so forth.

Sometimes the artist in me visually comes to the aid of the writer by laying out pages of material and notes side by side upon a table or two. Then I can see what I’m trying to do as a whole, and half intuitively, half intellectually make decisions about how to organize passages I may be having problems with. This process is always very challenging and thrilling to me. It always seems to work, although progress may still be slow at times. This method also helps greatly in counteracting that initial impatience the artist part of me strongly feels when my writer self comes upon a complex situation.