“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Friday evening Jane and I were visited by a psychologist [Ed Ostrander] from Cornell, after an exchange of letters over a period of several months. I’m afraid that the encounter was typical of others we’ve had with the members of academia, and once again we were rather taken by surprise. It wasn’t until the next day that we realized the visit had upset us more than we knew, because of the various connotations aroused. Although we liked him personally, we came to understand that he used words as a barrier to any real communication, asked Jane few questions. At the same time he thought himself liberal-minded, he repeatedly couched Seth’s ideas in the terms used by the respected, well-known members of his profession. He told us often that while he liked a good idea “no matter where it came from,” he wouldn’t use Seth’s name in conversations with others, but would try to work in Seth’s ideas under the guise of others’ works. Jane and I were slow: we didn’t realize that such thinking should have been challenged by us on the spot. Instead, we passively let it go by.

(By way of reactions, we thought of improving our behavior in any such future encounters, insistently if necessary, and of preparing for them by informing would-be visitors that they’d have to read a selected list of books beforehand. We would add that the books alone would indicate how different our thinking was from the usual, and that the visitor wouldn’t find us agreeing with much of what they might want to say. Such an approach meant that we’d be hard to deal with, I suppose, but at least all would be forewarned.

Your friend—Professor “Crazies”—thought himself on the one hand very avant-garde to come here, and on the other he felt the need to protect himself, to maintain the stance of a professor. You should indeed have spoken more freely, but you also should have seen him simply as an individual, and not as a symbol of a school, or a structure, or as a scientist.