“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?

(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.

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.

Experiment is a poor word—excursions—into the library while the two of you sit at the table, for example, would be excellent. Your joint dream episodes are always of benefit. The encouragement of such inner mobility also releases the bodily mechanisms. It is safe to move: he can get off dead center.