“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I had another of my “insights” while painting this morning, and talked it over with Jane after supper tonight. It was, simply, that we were wrong to blame imagined excesses of the spontaneous self for her problems—that really the trouble lay in her discovery that with the psychic abilities she was destined to find herself outside conventional creative authority: a person who learned that she would have to protect her very integrity as a person against charges of fraud. Publishers don’t put disclaimers on novels or poetry, I said. I added that Seth—and we—must have covered this ground many times over the years; yet now I felt that once again I was “on to something important.”

(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?

You are in charged waters indeed with your discussion. Most of the ideas that you stated were highly pertinent, applying specifically to Ruburt’s situation —but very touchy for him. As a child, couched in the Catholic Church, his poetry was a method of natural expression, a creative art, and also the vehicle through which he examined himself, the world as he knew it, and the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church.

Poetry was not considered fact, of course. It was a kind of concealed knowledge, apparent but not apparent. Later he tried straight novels, but when he let himself go his natural fiction fell into the form of fantasy, outside of the novel’s conventions into science fiction’s form—and at that time further away from the mainstream. He managed to get some of his work published, however, so that as he reached his early 30’s he had some apprenticeship under his belt.

(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.