“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yesterday afternoon we were visited by my brother Bill and his wife, Ida, from Ontario, NY. We all had a most enjoyable visit—I thought. We usually see them but once a year. But it developed that Jane had one of her most uncomfortable nights in years last night; she woke up often, very stiff, particularly in the dawn hours. She realized that she was reacting to what she’d taken to be all of the negative suggestions and circumstances surrounding Bill and Ida’s lives and beliefs. Later we wished we’d had the presence of mind to get up at dawn, say, when Jane’s more acute discomfort began.

(Jane also through the day received from Seth some material in answer to my remarks at breakfast this morning about the jacket colors chosen for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. The proof arrived in the mail while Dick and Ida were here; we looked at it without much reaction, but still thought about it on other levels a good deal. It lacks what I call good taste, as I’d feared it would, and is too cold and creepy. I for one have long reached the point where I expect little else from Prentice-Hall except shoddy work, and I think that by now Jane more or less agrees. She didn’t like the jacket colors.

He is in a period where he is trying to release impulses, but one look at that situation—momentarily, now—panicked him, so that he began to wonder if any discipline was not worthwhile to prevent what he considered that kind of intuitional and intellectual sloth.

There are people who work in art departments as a living, gifted certainly more than most with an ability to visually portray an idea. They sense an ideal, but those ideals and abilities are everywhere distorted by millions of other considerations. What do they think of their art themselves? To what purpose do they use it? What does their wife or husband think? What does the boss think? Whose version is the final one for a cover? What does the artist think of the subject matter? What are the artist’s standards of excellence?

(10:43 PM. Jane laughed. “I noticed that my voice cleared up as soon as I started the session.” Almost, at least, I said. Then Jane added: “I just got that he’s going to devote part of another session, a private one, to beliefs people have about old age. Because of the meeting with Dick and Ida....”