“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(2. I repeated to her the question I’d come up with about Dialogues at the end of the last deleted session. Why didn’t it sell—did readers avoid it because it was Jane’s own book, or poetry, or both? I said that I thought the implications here, that Jane’s “own” books didn’t do well, were pretty poor for anyone trying to build a career. I was angry that our readers weren’t helping out by buying the book.

The use of drugs even offers a pseudo-scientific explanation for interior events. Ruburt deals with the interior world the way most people deal with the exterior one. People find that in Dialogues disconcerting. In Ruburt’s other books his critical prose frames interior events, but in Dialogues there is no such frame. And the language is that of poetry. The form alienates many people because they are afraid of leaving the structured language of prose behind.

They feel without a guide. The subject and the predicate in prose are dependable. In poetry perception is immediate, the words arranged to intuition’s order, and the very rhythm carrying its own sway.

In the past, again, poetry was an important method of communication, but the “rationally” tuned mind suspects it. There is often nothing to be checked in it against physical reality in a concrete manner, for the message is intuitional and internal. People like poetry as a rule in your society only when it is dealing with conventional subjects, or directly with nature, so that in a way, now, the intuitions are used “to a rational end.”

Your portrait of Ruburt, for example, appealed to many people who did not appreciate your abstracts. Those who appreciated your abstracts did not appreciate the portrait. Poetry will sell if it is conventionally religious, or conventionally arty, or conventionally sentimental.