“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.

Now: Good evening.

Our books do not appear under the Parker heading. (Long pause.) They are in their way bridges between the two opposing ways of thought. They are too anti-establishment to be college textbooks, but in their way far too reasonable to be considered eccentricities — in the same fashion, now, that the Parker books are.

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.

(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.

(9:42.) Indeed, you both began to pull out of that yourselves. You did at least question the approach. In the meantime, of course, your nervous systems reacted to the implied threat against your work, a threat that now existed in the past, present, and future.

(9:59.) Now: Ruburt’s condition is coming along very well. He is feeling more active, and he will. And he should read the last group of sessions frequently. (Pause.) Do you have a question?

“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.