“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Today we received probably 30 letters from Prentice-Hall, some of which were dated in early October. We don’t know why the delay, but the batch makes up for what we’d taken to be a drop in the volume of mail over the last month; Jane had worried about falling sales, or some such thing. She wrote impressions on the back of each envelope, and of the first few she checked out, found some good “hits.” At the same time, by session time she was quite upset and irritable—appalled, really—at the content of some of the letters she’d read—this, we agreed, because we usually would focus more on the one negative letter compared to the ten positive ones—and by far most of them were very positive, friendly, sometimes even adulatory. A few mentioned the articles in the Village Voice.

You are not selling cosmetics now, and now Ruburt does not go door-to-door, but people come to you either physically or through their correspondence, and now you have far more to offer. You are not trying to pretty-up the world. You are trying to restructure the daily experience of the people who live in it.

The private letters, while indeed private, are in a strange fashion also a public outpouring of emotions, for those people of course make up the public. They write to you, or to me, but the questions are really addressed to the universe via this address.

They represent people’s deepest yearnings, exaltations, and hopes. They are meant as samplers, spread out before you, examples of the varieties of present human experience. Most correspondents do not really expect you or me to solve their problems for them—but the hope is there that somehow the problems can be solved, and that the problems themselves are important.

There are developments nearly ready, and I want him to remember once again the playfulness of creativity at all levels, including the physical. Peoples’ problems may be source material, but you must not dwell on them. They must be turned off, so that the creative abilities can transform them in their own way.

Carter was a cardinal in the 13th or 15th centuries—offhand, I am not sure which—then creatively unprincipled, comfortably lecherous, but he knew how to deal with politicians. And now he dons the psychological garb of a prince of the church.

You are lucky, in that his character is not given to fanaticism, but is tempered in that regard. He will have his finger in too many pies, while a fanatic concentrates unduly on one.

(9:58 PM. “Jesus Christ, that was short,” Jane exclaimed, looking at the clock, “but it doesn’t feel short....”