“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.

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.

Those same characteristics I have mentioned as applying to Prentice apply in their way to Tam, of course. He can indeed express great enthusiasm over work that is highly intuitional, while on the other hand he has a great respect, in his own way, for established learning and education.

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.

(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.

(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.

(Intently in a fast delivery:) You are protected. Your work is protected. When you realize that, you act out of confidence. You did indeed catch yourselves. Ruburt mentioned those concerns, but not with the same kind of feelings that he would have, say, [last] Saturday — and when you realize that you are protected, your own intellects can be reassured enough through experience so that they do not feel the need to solve problems with the rational approach in instances where that approach is not feasible.