“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.

(The little I’ve worked with the pendulum tells me my troubles are rooted in money attitudes, as well as the production time I’ve lost on Mass Events for the last two weeks and more. I thought I was doing something by working hard on that book, to get it underway in an organized fashion, I told Jane as we sat for the session—so what happened? I added that I wouldn’t put up with the kind of hassles involving Prentice-Hall beyond a certain point—that I’d take some kind of drastic action in order to rid myself of the problems connected with dealing with someone I no longer respect. This would involve holding the sessions, but letting Jane herself do any work about producing books for the market. I would go back to painting, try to sell some, and possibly end up with a part-time job for ready money—anything to break the vicious mental pattern of distrust I seem to keep creating. I believe that Jane at last understands that I’m quite capable of reacting that way, that I would refuse to indefinitely put up with our present kind of hassles with Prentice-Hall, or any other entity. I explained that I had such thoughts when we moved to Pinnacle Road, and could easily revive them and try a different kind of life.

As she was in life, she would not have understood in any case unless the money definitely came from a recognizable, socially accepted output on your part. To some extent, the affair of Crowder’s death made you look at yourself through what you thought were your mother’s eyes. You were judging yourself, and have, with some regularity, according to those standards. This is at an emotional level, of which of course you do not intellectually approve.

Crowder, you think, left a large moneyed estate—far more than either you or Ruburt possess. At the same time, you are more than a little contemptuous of what we may gently call the mental culture of Bill Crowder’s life and mind. A part of you even thinks “Ma is that what you wanted me to be?”

The issue of money has been important because of the conventional male values, and even with Prentice it seems you are not being a man unless you stand up to them. What you do is less important than what you think of what you are doing. Your painting is important. You should not abandon it—and that is also part of the problem.

(9:28.) Give us a moment.... The issue at Prentice, then, has been charged, not simply because of the errors made there, or abroad, but because of what those errors and stupidities represented to you—their symbolic content.

Most businesses, including Prentice, do not have that kind of vision. Period. As you have said yourself, the people simply want to get through their day’s job as quickly and as easily as possible. This does not mean they do not take some pride in their work, but that pride is in direct proportion to the poverty of their vision—so the vision must be yours and Ruburt’s. You make such people feel put-upon, bewildered. They do not know what you mean, if you approach them in such a fashion.

There was no ill intent on the part of the Dutch publisher, or the German. They wanted the books to start with because they did indeed respond to the books’ vision—but the versions they came out with represented the gap between what they understood and what they could not understand.

Give us a moment.... in a fashion Ruburt and Tam’s seemingly emotional, fairly spontaneous relationship has represented good common business sense on Ruburt’s part. Regardless of what better deals businesswise you may or may not have made in the past, both of you would have been highly discomfited by any frequent change of publishers. Part of your personal problem now is because you feel you have cut off the easy flow of creative energy into your painting and into Mass Reality, and even to some extent—on your part, now—because the contracts are unsigned, and the flow in that area momentarily is somewhat impeded.

(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.

Divide your time between Mass Reality if you want to and your painting. It does not matter which of you handles the business end, as long as you have as much peace of mind as possible, and as long as you judge events as clearly as possible, according to their actual proportion as apart from their emotionally charged symbolic content.

His understanding is growing by leaps and bounds, but it is highly important that you both get back to what you think of as important—your work, which should also be your play, and also to your love-making. And in that area, you should also forget any idea of sex roles in conventional terms.

That area has also suffered because of your joint ideas of what artists should be like, and what men and women who happen to be artists should be like. Think that one over. That emotional flow is important.