“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(2. From a discussion Jane and I had the other day: Why do Seth’s books sell so much better than her own? I’ve always been upset by this, and several recent visitors have admitted reading only the Seth books. The question has been exaggerated lately by Prentice-Hall’s decision to let Dialogues go out of print —John Nelson’s office wrote Jane last week, offering to sell us as many copies as we wanted at 85 cents a copy. Tam also told Jane last Friday that some other publishers of poetry have turned down Dialogues for paperback editions. This situation also makes me think that if I wrote Through My Eyes, people wouldn’t pay much attention to that either, on a large-enough scale to make it worth doing. This is spite of an occasional request I get from a fan about that book.

Give us a moment.... You moved through belief systems, becoming to some extent disillusioned. You looked at the world and could no longer accept many of the basic beliefs upon which its fabric is socially founded. Many of the people who read my books are also disillusioned with the world’s beliefs. They have been brought up to believe in authority, yet they realize that the authorities know far less than they originally supposed. They are afraid, however, of going out on their own, so to speak, and many are involved in lives that have been built upon past beliefs.

(10:15.) They do not trust themselves. They do not have the stamina, or the resoluteness, however, yet, to face a reality in which they are the creators of their circumstances. They no longer trust religion or science in organizational terms. If they read Ruburt’s books, they must accept the fact that Ruburt, as a woman, without the world’s credentials, will dare to follow the dictates of the inner self, and this makes the entire affair more frightening to them, to a degree.

They are afraid of vulnerability. They are between the comic book world and your own. They yearn for an authority they can trust. Ruburt’s books show that it is not all that easy, in their terms. They want to believe that he depends upon me to make all his decisions, and they do not want to hear about his independent thinking. They are between dependence and independence, at the level of which I am speaking.

Give us a moment.... My work is in a way more direct than Ruburt’s. It appeals to many levels of the psyche at once. It can be interpreted at many depths. From the comic book reader to the scholar, each will find a point of contact within my work. The comic book reader will interpret it in his own way, and perhaps I will emerge as a supersoul instead of a superman (with humor).

You have to be fairly intellectual to read Ruburt’s books. You think my books require much effort, and people often say so—yet you get letters from people who are nearly illiterate. This is nothing against Ruburt’s books, for they are excellent—but people become frightened sometimes because they do not want to compare themselves to Ruburt. They want to think that I spring automatically into your lives, as Superman. They did not question Superman. Only a simple change of clothing was required for our hero, Mr. Kent. They want to endow me with an authority that will make up for the authority they are trying to be free of. They do not want Ruburt’s inquiring mind to intrude.

(With much humor and irony:) What comic book reader wants to bother with a Clark Kent who, before his transformation, distracts the reader with such beside-the-point questions as “What am I doing? How do I, a mere mortal, suddenly turn into Superman? Is this mission necessary? At what point am I me? When does the transformation occur? What are my motives? What is the nature of the reality that lets this miracle occur?”

Or worse—what comic book reader wants Clark Kent to shout out from the phone booth, or wherever “You can do this too, or your version, because we all have a reality in which we are Clark Kent and Superman at one and the same time?” Such people simply want Superman to perform his miracles.

Give us a moment.... To an important extent, you disdain the opinions of your age, of your times. At the same time, to some extent, you act as if you court them. You purposefully go against the conventions and beliefs of your times. You even stay out of the various “underground movements” that have some following, and would embrace you. With all due regards (amused), I speak to your fellow men and women in a certain democracy of spirit. I do not restrict my words or my works to those who in any way or terms may be considered stupid, or dumb, or greedy, or incompetent or silly. My books carry no such prejudice—or they are addressed to those portions of the personality that exist inviolate.

You imagine what might happen to future books. You do not suitably live in the present. This does not mean you need wear blinders—but when you are not suitably reacting to the validity of the present and immediate sense data, then to some extent you are putting on blinders of a different kind.

(1. How would Jane’s books do in the marketplace if Seth’s books didn’t exist?

(2. How will “Unknown” Reality do? Seth’s material this evening was making me wonder if my notes were going to be detrimental in that work. But I was also simply curious about whether “Unknown” Reality was going to do as well as the other Seth books.

Without my books, Ruburt’s books would not be the same. He would not have written them. It is impossible to say what he would have written. His books would not have shown the ability that they do now, however. “Unknown” will do well. Most likely it will be put out as one volume sometime in the future. It will be considered a textbook, however, and somewhat of a collector’s item.

I expect you to write your own book, and I believe you are too tenacious not to. You will think “I will say my piece and it will serve them right.” But you have been practicing to write it for some time now. Do you have other questions?