“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Popular novelists and writers are above all things people of their times. They are socially oriented, dealing with lively discourse. They cannot see beyond the times. As a rule, however, they enjoy people as people are. They enjoy stupid people, wicked people, cowardly people, bigoted people, and sometimes wise people too. They do not make demands. They share the belief systems of their times, and they are richly rewarded—generally speaking, now—for there is overall no great conflict between their natural works, their writing, and the world at large.

(I should take the space here to set the scene. After supper this evening I read a news account of the riches accruing to a nationally known popular writer, his son and daughter, who shall be nameless here. Royalties, prime-time TV series, movies, TV specials—there was no area in which the family wasn’t making incredible amounts of money. All they produce is garbage. I was of course especially angry that they were world renowned while I thought Jane’s great abilities were largely unappreciated and ill paid for by Prentice, Bantam, etc. The recent sale of Oversoul Seven to an English publishing house for an unbelievable $100, and Prentice’s recent notice to us of a possible sale of Seth Speaks for translation and publishing by a German house for only $300 bothered me greatly; I just couldn’t believe that so little money was available in Europe, no matter what Prentice told us. [I still don’t.]

The world responds to such people’s acceptance. Obviously escapism is involved—but at certain levels of interaction the beliefs smoothly flow from creation to market. No great challenges are presented, and no real condemnations; and when these do occur they are of a conventional nature, perhaps already stylish accusations. They are part and parcel of the social world.

A great many people belong to that world. Even intelligent men and women, some original thinkers, depend upon more or less organized procedures and recognized channels, through which communications with others like them are made. These are, for example, the psychological societies, the medical or scientific groups in which people who share common interests and backgrounds have a meeting place.

Not only is our own work rather unique, but you have no academic credentials. You have avoided, for example, holding seminars of that nature. In that framework many psychologists, for example, would feel comfortable, but you offer no such bridge to anyone. You avoid “the wild psychic world” of cults, semicults, and so forth, and above all you are individualists who do not play according to game rules.

Psychics are supposed to stick together, at least informally, before the world (humorously). They expect from each other a kind of blanket approval that neither of you give. Our books are being read by many “important people” in medicine, science, religion, and the arts. They are indeed forming events. You are to that extent affecting your society. You do not, however, through your attitudes play the kind of game that is necessary.

You have little patience, jointly, with that kind of world. The Hollywood director (Alan Neuman) who called, for example. Ruburt was warm, curious, and solitary. He did not reinforce the director’s sense of his own importance, and the man was used to that. Nor did he speak in the honeyed spiritual tones that the man expected from the psychics he dealt with.

To some extent you are unable to explain the secret nature of your own painting. You refuse to use it as collateral. Not only that, but your paintings are not an attempt to communicate with the world, or to get anything from it. You think you should—that is, you think you should sell your paintings, or make some effort in that direction. Instead they are communications between yourself and the universe, without the need, necessarily, that others approve or disapprove, or see or not see. In your writing, however, you want to communicate.

When you think that Ruburt is being taken advantage of then by the world, in any way involving money, then you feel guilty that you do not use painting to procure money.

(10:43.) Your stance with the world is involved. Behind it all, however, is the feeling that you do not express your love verbally, or through touch, to Ruburt, so that instead you look out for ways that feel he is being taken advantage of; and through that concern, you express your love. He does not understand this.

(10:53. Jane’s pace throughout had been good, and limited only by my own writing speed. I thought the material was excellent in all respects. I didn’t see how the insights could be better, I told Jane, and will try hard to implement them. I thought part of the material was hilarious, about our attitudes toward the world. I think that Seth’s expression for me of my feelings toward Jane were most accurate and penetrating—the kind of information one could spend months acquiring with the help of others, say. My own pendulum answers had steered me in the right direction, I saw, but were far short of being complete enough. I felt better than I had in some time.

Your father expected the worst of the world. You have not seriously, with determination, examined those beliefs. If they were true the world simply would not have lasted this long. Nuclear destruction has little to do with it. If anything, it adds to my argument—for if those theories really held sway, one nation or another by now would have already destroyed your world. Hence, you do not make any simple, joyful remarks, like “The book will be out in England or Germany,” and indeed, you take little pleasure from that, but leap ahead to the imagined threats. A man protects his family because he loves it—but in his love he can see threats all around.

(11:21.) Ruburt responds to people, however, more than you. Your feelings about the world—to some extent—are mental and hypothetical. You isolate yourself from people in a way that he does not. Since he is more emotionally outgoing and literal-minded, he cannot close himself off emotionally in that regard. In a way, he is not using discrimination. You use an emotional aloofness with the world, and he has become physically aloof instead.

He reacts practically, then, by avoiding what he thinks of as conflict, and you do not help in that regard, for by temperament you are not particularly attracted to the world. He feels he is so attracted, temperamentally, and so puts on physical guards. The bridge here involves the natural world, his love of nature, the connections between poetry, strolling the natural world as opposed to the social one.

He felt that the female was not temperamentally equipped to naturally handle such problems, and so adopted the symptoms. Because you so often expressed your concerns rather than your love, your fears rather than your hopes, and because of his own nature, the outside world appeared more threatening. He is by nature rather optimistic. From you he believed he learned that optimism was shallow, unrealistic, and that people were not to be trusted. He never believed in conflict. He is not abject, but he believes heartily in having nothing to do with an arena of activity in which he feels he might meet ridicule or criticism.

You do not expect the world to understand good work. You expect the artist, in whatever field, who is truly good, to be shunted aside. Your own hopes rise despite those beliefs, and have worked for you. But you have felt jointly that it was unsafe to trust the world; unrealistic; and while you could maintain a mental isolation, Ruburt adopted a physical one.

(12:01.) His worry about his condition added additional tension. The working men (for Frank Longwell) made him feel as if the world intruded, and by its standards he felt to some extent exposed. Here were the two of you, doing what in the world’s eyes he felt was in direct opposition to its standards—the brawny, outdoorsy, hearty, family oriented males involved.