“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

INSERTING NEW IDEAS INTO THE WORLD.

(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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.