“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(All during this time, October–November, we’ve also been involved in a series of hassles with the foreign publishers Ankh-Hermes and Ariston. We’ve learned to our sorrow and rage that both entities have cut their versions of Seth Speaks, without our permission or knowledge, and have struggled to exert what force we could in order to rectify the situation. I thought it much more likely that these sorts of challenges were much more likely to be behind my problems. We do feel let down on the issue of foreign rights by Prentice-Hall, and the overseas publishers as well. As I’ve said to Jane more than once, “I wonder what we ought to know that Tam hasn’t told us”—meaning of course that every time a hassle develops with Prentice-Hall we find out a new batch of information that Tam has known all along but never relayed to us. This makes for a series of ugly surprises along the way of our travels with Prentice-Hall, since they always seem to involve money in a negative way, or royalties being withheld, etc.

(Long pause at 9:55.) I do not want to define for you an ideal picture to which you can never live up. That is, I do not want your practical experience of life to seem inferior as you are in the process of learning how to live in a new fashion. The patterns of give-and-take between you and others are actually very simple to describe and delicate at a certain level of activity. There is some material of course that I have not given, though I will, because it would seem to you initially that in the light of what is possible, you were doing poorly—where instead in the light of your reality at this time, you are doing well. You must realize that you are judging your behavior by standards that are very high indeed, and that you are in a situation in which, say, all of the facts are not yet in. You have been geared to disapprove of yourselves, you have been taught to judge your performance in a very shallow fashion, according to social mores and sexual affiliation, and when you are breaking out of those patterns, you may indeed feel betwixt and between.