“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane didn’t hold her regularly scheduled session last Wednesday evening. She didn’t particularly feel like one tonight, either, but she decided to have it rather than “sit around all night.” The weather was still very humid and warm, after a 90-degree day. It’s also the first evening of fall, which began at 5:09 P.M., according to TV. Jane has been doing well, though, and yesterday walked three times — the most in one day that I can remember offhand. Her general physical improvements continue.

(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.

(The whole affair has led to some degree of depression on my part. I told Jane that I felt the disclaimer planned for one of our books by the publisher could hardly be the end of such thinking. Overreacting, I envisioned disclaimers showing up in all of the books as they were reprinted. We discussed various scenarios over the weekend, considering the ways in which we could choose to react to the whole business.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

Now: As I said before, also, when faced with the difficulty, the conventional, rational approach tells you to look at the problem, examine it thoroughly, project it into the future, and imagine its dire consequences — and so, faced with the idea of a disclaimer (for Mass Events), that is what you did to some extent, the two of you. You saw the disclaimer as fact, imagined it in your minds on the pages of our books, projected all of that onto future books, and for fine good measure you both imagined this famous disclaimer published in editions of all the books as well.

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.

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.