“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.

I would like to give you some insight as to why Prentice-Hall is our publisher to begin with. Maybe we can, in that way, clear up a matter that often seems to contain some mystery (amused.

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.

Our books are in the regular trade department. This poses some problems for the legal department, which is given to the most literal translation of reality as interpreted through law. You have almost what you could call a schizophrenic relationship, existing, say, between Parker Books and Prentice’s trade-book division. The textbook division represents the workings of the intellect in the usual terms of rational thought, and in those books the qualities of the imagination, of the psyche, of poetry, of creativity, are quite lacking. Such qualities are indeed considered threats, for they do not accept easy answers, and are not content with the status quo.

(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.

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.

(Louder:) And let me add, I covered our flank in the book —

Ruburt is anxious that Prentice present our books in the best light in the world. They also have their own paranoid tendencies, and overworked intellects to contend with. The magical approach will get you through, if you use it.

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.