“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(All week we’ve been doing additional medical notes for the copy-edited manuscript of Mass Events. Even today Jane talked to Tam Mossman, her editor at Prentice-Hall, about various matters involving the book. I dislike the whole situation intensely. In my frustration, I told Jane over the weekend that I intended to go back to painting, starting this morning, but it didn’t work out that way. We’ve even considered withdrawing Mass Events from publication, although Tam reassured Jane this morning that things would work out all right. I didn’t mail a long letter Jane wrote him over the weekend; she covered its points in the call this morning. Now we have an idea for our own type of “disclaimer” for the frontmatter of Mass Events, based upon a very apt quote from Seth’s material that we found late in the book. I mailed Tam a copy of it today.

(We hadn’t asked that Seth discuss the Prentice-Hall situation this evening — but when Seth came through with a rather ironic smile. …)

I would like to give you some insight as to why Prentice-Hall is our publisher to begin with. Maybe we can, in that way, clear up a matter that often seems to contain some mystery (amused.

Once said, the explanation will certainly seem obvious. (Pause.) Prentice-Hall, in capsule form, so to speak, is a representative of the most diverse kinds of thought currently held in your country — that is, under it’s overall auspices you have the most conventional establishment-oriented textbooks, devoted to continuing traditional ideas. You have, there, a concentration upon education as it is understood at that level.

Under Prentice’s auspices, however, you also have Parker Books — books that are devoted to quite anti-establishment ideas and concepts — to all brands of psychic, scientific, or religious eccentricities, given to matters that contradict the establishment and challenge it at every point. And there, too, you have a concentration upon education, in that the books are written to instruct.

Our books are in the regular trade department. This poses some problems for the legal department, which is given to the most literal translation of reality as interpreted through law. You have almost what you could call a schizophrenic relationship, existing, say, between Parker Books and Prentice’s trade-book division. The textbook division represents the workings of the intellect in the usual terms of rational thought, and in those books the qualities of the imagination, of the psyche, of poetry, of creativity, are quite lacking. Such qualities are indeed considered threats, for they do not accept easy answers, and are not content with the status quo.

Many of the Parker books on the other hand emphasize creativity, the intuitions, the use of the imagination, but are relatively innocent of any clear reasoning, logic, or any feeling for tradition at all. I am simplifying here to some extent to make my point. Prentice is always, then, to some extent in a state of creative tension, as the seemingly opposed, seemingly contradictory elements are each expressed through these two divisions.

(9:23.) Give us a moment … Prentice does more than it knows it does. As a corporate entity, it also has a conscious and unconscious intent, as do all organizations, because they must mirror the people who belong to them. In its way Prentice is an educational institution. It tries to fly ahead with avant garde ideas, while at the same time protecting its flank of college textbooks. (With amusement:) It does not know if our work is fact or fiction, in the deepest of terms. It knows the work is not forged. It knows that I appear in sessions, for example, but it does not know whether or not my ideas correspond with a greater reality, or whether they are the result of an extraordinary psychological creativity.

Those same characteristics I have mentioned as applying to Prentice apply in their way to Tam, of course. He can indeed express great enthusiasm over work that is highly intuitional, while on the other hand he has a great respect, in his own way, for established learning and education.

Now with the various people at Prentice, you will have such tendencies often appearing separately, so that one person will be highly conventional and dislike changes, while another might be responsive to work that was emotionally exciting, avant garde. The publishing house — that publishing house — represents in capsule form the extremes of thought of your time, from the most conventional to the most bizarre. It therefore represents the public’s ideas in their great variety.

The legal department knows how to deal with the Parker books. (Tam told Jane it’s putting disclaimers in all Parker books.) It knows how to deal with fiction. It knows how to deal with conventional textbooks — but in a fashion our books combine all of those elements, and transcend them. If Prentice were as conventional at heart as its legal department, it would not publish books at all, except perhaps for the textbooks.

Our books are attempting to insert new ideas into the world as it now is, by combining the powers of the intellect and the powers of the intuitions — in other words, by closing the two ends of Prentice’s extremes.

(Long pause.) Now: We have been dealing with the magical approach, and let me gently remind the two of you that I said that you must be willing to change all the way from the old system of orientation to the new, if you want the new approach to work fully for you in your lives. That will, as it happens, include your approach to Prentice, of course.

Ruburt is anxious that Prentice present our books in the best light in the world. They also have their own paranoid tendencies, and overworked intellects to contend with. The magical approach will get you through, if you use it.

1. Seth was right. It never happened: For all of our worries, those in charge at Prentice-Hall did not decide to use disclaimers of responsibility in any of Jane’s other books.