“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In a fashion, you consider the public arena of TV and tours in the same way that Joseph views the world of art galleries, shows, and auctions. You disdain it, while considering publishing acceptable. Besides this, it seems to you that such encounters involve a simplification and distortion by their very nature as far as your work is concerned, along with a unique kind of psychological disclosure that could be humiliating, lacking the proper frame of understanding. In a world in which women are considered passive and the trance largely feminine, you feel that the performance of a session could be too easily misread. This offends your sense of privacy while reading poetry to others does not.

At the same time you’ve felt a strong responsibility to perform publicly, to sell books, get your message across, let people see that—yes, the sessions do happen—there is no fraud involved. You were also afraid that spontaneously you would want to do public encounter work, that you’d be tempted, that once begun, you’d be swept along and that the circumstances would be volatile.

That is, trance work you feel requires a safe framework and stresses a private stance even though its messages can be shared. Even then the question arises of public response to trance messages when they contradict official thought—and your questions about how the material might be misused as you explained in God of Jane very well, and—How “responsible” is the conscious mind for trance messages?—How responsible are you for Seth’s messages? That is the kind of question with which few people contend. The very phrasing of the question and the word, responsible, shows its loaded nature. Actually the sessions show a remarkable synthesis of conscious and unconscious abilities, a creative blend that fulfills all portions of the psyche....