“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.

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.

(“You certainly did.” Seth’s amused reference was to manuscript page 457 in Mass Events. Jane and I decided to use his passage, with a note, in the frontmatter of the book, for he stressed that until they’re mentally clear about their beliefs people should continue to see doctors.)

(10:04 P.M. For someone who hadn’t felt like having a session, Jane did very well.)

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.

“I lay on our bed, fully clothed, while waiting for Jane to finish in the bathroom. As usual, the little light on her bureau to my right was on. I lay flat on my back, with my head turned a little toward the dim light. I was quite sleepy, and fell into a state between waking and sleeping. Then I became aware that once again I was perceiving “the light of the universe,” as Seth calls it. This experience was milder than my three previous ones, but was still most intriguing.