“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Before supper this evening Jane said she was tired of “trying to figure out the world,” and so forth. Part of her pique stemmed from her difficulty in trying to get into her ideas on heroics. She has done some excellent writing on heroic themes in recent days, but hasn’t plunged into her library yet. And to me: “Sometimes I think that you, whenever you get any idea that doesn’t have to do with painting, ought to stamp it out with both feet, and just stick to that. You shouldn’t ever have left it....” I admitted that the thought had occurred to me—that indeed I’d been thinking about it a lot since I’d had my physical hassles starting early last month.

(I told Jane that I’d long given up trying to hammer out my next writing project, as Seth had mentioned I was trying to do in one of these recent deleted sessions. I was now simply trying to live each day, painting, working on the files, or in the yard, doing errands, and so forth. It’s all helped, although I don’t feel completely free physically yet. I’ve managed to come up with some new insights about painting, however, and have begun implementing them. I can already tell the difference in the work, and am very pleased with that. The insights, which seem rather obvious in retrospect, represent a sort of synthesis that I’ve been trying for in recent years.

(Today we received from Larry Dowler of the Yale archives a letter giving us his latest thoughts, as well as a form to sign. making the gift of papers to Yale legal, evidently. We have a number of questions to resolve first, though. At the moment I must be putting them off, but eventually we’ll deal with them all. We haven’t received our will from Bill Danaher yet, and we have more questions for him, also. I told Jane that I regretted starting that whole business, but she responded by saying that we’d have to do it sometime, probably, so we might as well go through with it. I’m somewhat dismayed by the work that might be entailed – that is, if I carry through with the original idea of checking through all the material, putting it into notebooks that match the originals, and so forth.

(9:53.) To some extent both of you, and by your own choices, have established your own laboratory of the mind, in which you live your lives and examine them at the same time—and in which you try to view any maladies and dissatisfactions by different standards; and in a light that requires more of you, so that you do not rely as others do upon the comforts of conventionalized knowledge in any field.

You may do as you wish about Yale. It matters little where the papers are kept; and the very academic characteristics that invisibly but definitely add their aura to Yale’s hallowed halls also means that the papers will be treated fairly, conservatively, and without any evangelical air.