“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Our talk lasted almost an hour in spite of myself, for I didn’t want her to get upset before a session. I felt that we couldn’t afford to miss sessions these days. Her reading the NY Times Book Review each week had reminded me recently that her intent perusal of that publication represented a striving toward something she was not about to achieve—conventional recognition in creative writing.

(The insight, such as it was, offered many clues to our present situation. I asked that Seth discuss it if she held a session tonight. Jane had been quite blue after sleeping for a couple of hours late this afternoon—and after she’d already slept for two hours this morning. It wasn’t that her psychic work, and the books, weren’t good, I said, or that they didn’t help people, but that they didn’t fit into the world as she saw it. Seth himself had referred to her dilemma in the excerpt I’ve taken from the private session for January 26, 1981, very well.

(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.

There are multitudinous elements operating against such an initiation in your society, and particularly these operated back in those days when the sessions first began. There is a natural desire to want the respect of one’s fellows, to avoid social taboos or ostracism. Those issues were encountered at that time because Ruburt’s abilities thrust them through their surfaces. His abilities grew despite the society’s inhibiting factors. It did take Ruburt some time to fully understand how his work might perhaps be regarded. The fact that I could also write books was of the greatest benefit, of course (dryly, almost with a smile) —and no one was more surprised than Ruburt to discover that I could do so.

As he continued with his books and mine, he became more bewildered, in that there seemed to be no literary framework in which they were legitimately reviewed. It was as if he were considered a writer no longer, or as if the writing itself, while considered good enough, was also considered quite beside the point—of secondary concern, and in the psychic field the very word “creative” often has suspicious connotations. Many such people want the truth, in capital letters, in quite literal form, without creativity slurring the message, so to speak, or blurring the absolute edges of fact and fiction.

(Pause at 9:44.) There was a necessary period of time in which Ruburt and yourself experimented in several areas of psychic exploration, quite rightly picking and choosing those areas that suited you best, and ignoring others that you found for whatever reasons unsuitable. Ruburt quickly discovered that the public image of a psychic was quite different than that given to a writer, and so was the social image. As our readership grew, as you heard from readers or from some members of the media or whatever, it seemed to Ruburt that what he did best—have sessions, write his books—was not enough, that he was expected to do far more.

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.

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.