“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.

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.

(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.

(Intently in a fast delivery:) You are protected. Your work is protected. When you realize that, you act out of confidence. You did indeed catch yourselves. Ruburt mentioned those concerns, but not with the same kind of feelings that he would have, say, [last] Saturday — and when you realize that you are protected, your own intellects can be reassured enough through experience so that they do not feel the need to solve problems with the rational approach in instances where that approach is not feasible.

I will, of course, have more to say that will hopefully allow you to use your intellects in a clear fashion, to better your performances. You are quite right, again, to say that “There are elements in this situation — or in any given situation — impossible for my intellect to know,” so the intellect can take that fact into consideration. Otherwise, you expect it to make deductions while denying it the comfort it should have, of knowing that its deductions need not be made on its own knowledge alone, but on the intuition’s vast magical bank of information — from which, in larger terms, all of the intellect’s information must spring. So I think you are both finally trying to use a new approach in that direction.

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.

“Now behind the door was a brilliant pulsing light — but I could see only the small portion of it at the top of the nearly-shut door. My reactions during the experience were quite objective this time. I knew what I was creating. I had none of the thrilling sensations, for example, that can sweep over me at such times.