“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Today Jane heard from Tam that Prentice-Hall had signed a contract with a Dutch publisher for a translation of Seth Speaks into that language. The news was a complete surprise to us. Because of paper problems, costs, et cetera, the edition is to be in two volumes, and there’s a two-year time limit. Tam told Jane that at our request he’d checked with John Nelson, who in turn had checked the contract with the Swiss publisher, to the effect that the German-language translation of Seth Speaks is definitely not to be cut, as that particular publisher had wanted to do a couple of years ago. So the two foreign-language editions of that book are certainly good news —the kind that Seth wants Jane to list daily, as he suggested she do. But the Dutch language? It had never even remotely occurred to us.

In the case of your newspaper story, the same kinds of events happened several times in various ways to all of the people involved. At unconscious levels the results were known, and the seeming accident was a planned event—a play ready to happen when all parties involved found the circumstances apt.

(So I felt a keen regret, actually, that the idea, one of the best I’ve ever had, will probably never be used. Neither Jane nor I have the temperament for it, or even the time if we did want to do it. It could be developed as a novel. We talked about the difficulties that might be involved in getting family members to talk openly to strangers, too, about what had happened to them. Some we thought would be glad to, others most vehemently not. Also, how would one explain to a family that with Seth’s ideas in mind certain other family members had chosen, or planned, their deaths? Not an easy thing to do at all, unless lots of time was available, and perhaps an exceptional willingness to learn on the parts of such families. I suppose that part of any such survey could also go into the refusal of certain families to restudy what had happened to them in the light of Seth’s ideas.

Our work, in those terms, may have turned into a career, but not a career that you can equate with others. You are writing new rules. You are not good lawyers, or physicians, or whatever. You purposefully, while speaking to your times, speak to those beyond your times and to the future. Instead of children you send ideas into the future.

You both decided—and insisted upon—adding this timelessness to your lives. You avoided other roots that might allow you to fit into the times in an easier fashion, for those very roots would tie your imagination and ideas to the times, however invisibly.

(10:51 PM—At break we’d also expressed our fears about Jane’s progress, beside talking about the book idea. Jane was especially concerned that every time she improved so far she’d regress because she’d touch upon certain hidden fears that she’d adopted as protection against the world. I added to the discussion by noting that I was deeply concerned that she’d reinforced her own self-doubts through what I said about the world myself, over the years. Sort of a vicious-circle idea.