“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The session started much later than usual Saturday night, since we slept too late during our nap. Jane doesn’t like to go into trance too soon after eating. It had been a good day, though. When we came home from shopping this noon we found the first five copies of Volume l of “Unknown” Reality waiting for us. It looked good and we were pleased.

(10:59. I raised a hand to Jane in trance, signaling her to be quiet. For the second time I heard a gentle scratching-rapping at our front screen door. It was a humid night and our living room door was wide open. A young man who had hitchhiked from Oregon stood in the darkness. “You’re too late, man,” I said. On the lawn behind him lay a guitar and a heavy backpack.

(Since I liked him—Michael— as we talked, I sat on the front steps for a few minutes with him. Our neighbor Marian came by, looking for her dog; she stopped to talk to us. By then over half an hour had passed. I gave up on the session. Jane laughed inside the house. We invited our guest in for a beer. He was from Port Arthur, Texas. He was quite intelligent, a musician who had written an “opera,” he told us. Like a number of our other recent callers, he was traveling around the country, seemingly free of all ties, doing odd jobs on occasion, but living on little money. In a way I envied them. Michael had no place to stay, regardless of the weather.

(He stayed until about 12:20 AM, then left, bound for where?.... Jane said the next day that we should have offered him shelter, but I didn’t feel any compulsion to do so. I did think that practically all of our unannounced visitors were young people because the Seth material attracted them much more easily than older generations. I thought it a good sign, actually, since these young people would one day be playing roles in society; at least, I thought, they’d have been exposed to what we thought were good ideas in their formative years.

If you want our books in toto to sell far better, you have only to send out such messages, and imagine them doing so.

Before you send out such messages, then, see if you want to accept the consequences. Work such as ours is a different matter than a novel. A novelist may indeed maintain seclusion from the world—and while the world may not like it, it doesn’t care enough, except for a few publicity seekers, to track him down.

Our work is affecting the lives of millions—of millions (repeated in answer to my surprised look at Seth), through direct readership, and through the influence of those readers upon others, who may not, for example, even read the books, or who may read rarely in any case.

(“Well, supposing we did concentrate upon increased sales, and did more publicity work on radio and television, for instance: wouldn’t these things increase Jane’s feeling of vulnerability? Here she has the symptoms as a kind of protection, so I’m wondering about our reactions if we took steps that would put us more in the public eye—left us open to more criticism—as well as praise—for instance. How might she react under the new circumstances”)