“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.

(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.

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.

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.

In the deepest of terms it was not reasonable (underlined) to nearly assume that a disclaimer, if used, would therefore be retroactively and then continuously used. It was not a conclusion based upon fact, but a conclusion based upon a reason that applied to one probability only, one series of probable acts — or based upon the probable act of a disclaimer being used to begin with.¹ So again, what we are dealing with is an overall lesson in the way in which the reasoning mind has been taught to react. These are really instances where the intellect has been trained to use only a portion of its abilities, to zoom in on the most pessimistic of any given series of probable actions — and then treat those as if they were facts.

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.