“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(She’d obviously, I thought, expected recognition by her peers in the writing field when she matured, with her obvious talents. Yet she’d found this deep yearning snatched away with the advent of her psychic abilities—goodbye to all of those accepted reviews, the critical success, even the money, that would go along with the conventional acceptable public image of the successful writer of good quality poetry and/or fiction. I said that most “successful?” poetry and fiction might not penetrate very deeply into the human condition, compared with the understanding her own psychic gifts offered, but it would have been safe and accepted by her peers. What more could anyone ask of life, I demanded ironically?

(Her challenge, then, is that she’s never integrated fully her psychic orientation, the true source of all of her gifts, with her views of the rest of her world. I think, I added, that it was an error to blame fear of the spontaneous self going too far if given free reign—I didn’t think nature would arrange things that way, for the organism couldn’t survive for long that way. The behavior of Instream, the other psychologist at Oswego, the demand for credentials from Fell and others, the letters asking for help of various kinds—especially those from the unbalanced—all of these things and more added up in her eyes to an indictment, one might say, of one’s very nature. Clear indications that left alone without safeguards one would go too far for one’s own good.

(No wonder, then, the retreat from the world, even the refusal to leave the house. Protection from the world must be had at all costs, even while she, with my help, persisted in using her abilities to some extent at least through the books. I wondered how much about all of this she’d never let Seth say. No wonder we sought privacy more and more: any public exposure came to be avoided automatically, as part of the protective coloration.

(She’s been sleeping much better, but with interspersed bouts of restlessness and discomfort in her backside and legs. Right now she was also uncomfortable as she waited for Seth to come through. Earlier today I’d told her I realized how cleverly she’d engineered her activities so that she didn’t go to the john very often. Right then, she hadn’t been to the bathroom since noon. “I’d go if I had to,” she protested, but I answered that she’d simply trained her body to wait as long as possible for such natural acts; then she could avoid all the discomfort of getting into the bathroom and on the john, etc. I added that I supposed now she’d work it so that she only went to the john once before going to bed after the session. I wondered if she was trying to set a record for holding it. By way of contrast, I wanted to ask Seth to comment on the good things her psychic abilities have accomplished. But right at this time she can barely get from her chair to sit on the john or the bed—literally.)

He could have tried to publish the material in camouflaged form through fiction, and he was far more tempted to take such a line than perhaps you realized. Had one of his straight novels been accepted at that time, the story might be different somewhat. He recognized, however, the excellent quality in his own newer writings and in my own work also. He recognized the elements of mystery and creativity involved in the entire affair, and realized that he could not after all camouflage all of that, and so took the course upon which you both embarked.

At the same time, he was to be denied his rightful place as a writer (as I’d said earlier), to defend this new position—a position moreover that seemed to change all the time—for beside my books there was Seven, Sumari, and later Cézanne and James. Each one flying in the face of one kind of conventional misunderstanding or another. He felt that he could hardly keep up with the spontaneous self: what was it about to do next?

Now in Mass Events and God of Jane he courageously went still further, letting it all hang out, as they say—a necessary part of his own growth and development. That is, he is better off for producing those two books than he would be otherwise.

(Pause at 10:05.) Even poetry did not seem to be work for a while, for example, nor did psychic activity for its own sake (Long pause.) All of this in its way fits together with other material—but no writers of merit, for example (intently), outside of Richard Bach, have written him to applaud his work, and to the writing community it seems he does not exist. The psychic community is a hodgepodge to which he feels no natural leanings, as far as its organizations or affiliations are concerned.

This is because his position is unique, in that he is dealing in areas that serve as thresholds, where ordinary creativity is accelerated and goes beyond itself, where fact turns into fiction, and fiction into fact. In those unknown realms, from which all psychological events are formed, he wants to fly ahead theoretically—that is, to delve through my books and through his own into ideas that still await, and feels somewhat angry because it seems that excellent theoretical material is overlooked by others to a large extent, while being used as a Band-Aid to help the current problems of the people.

—of work well done. That recognition in a fashion comes from several fronts—from people in all walks of life, from professors, members of different professions rather—than specifically from other writers (pause), and in time that situation itself will improve. It is the public image as he thinks he has as a psychic that bothers him, more than the one he feels is lacking as a writer.