“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.

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.