“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.

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.

(“That certainly would be nice.”)

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.

(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.

In the deepest of terms it was not reasonable (underlined) to nearly assume that a disclaimer, if used, would therefore be retroactively and then continuously used. It was not a conclusion based upon fact, but a conclusion based upon a reason that applied to one probability only, one series of probable acts — or based upon the probable act of a disclaimer being used to begin with.¹ So again, what we are dealing with is an overall lesson in the way in which the reasoning mind has been taught to react. These are really instances where the intellect has been trained to use only a portion of its abilities, to zoom in on the most pessimistic of any given series of probable actions — and then treat those as if they were facts.