“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yesterday morning I took a call from Nancy Overton and Saul Cohen, who evidently will have the job of shepherding Jane’s work through Prentice-Hall, now that Tam has left. The call was in response to my letter to Nancy on October 22, re Tam telling Jane that Pocket Books had published the paperback edition of Seven II. Not so, SC explained, citing the mix-up surrounding Tam’s leaving and his own efforts to learn what was going on in the new job.

(The call was over our speakerphone, so Jane could hear SC when he said that her Seven III “was charming,” and that he liked it very much. He wants to see more, and I explained what Jane has ready and has yet to do. I didn’t say anything about Seth’s Dreams. Jane was very pleased that SC liked Seven, since I learned that she’d been worrying about this. She wants to check the next five chapters before sending them to Tam, who will send them to SC when he edits them, but she hasn’t done any work on them recently. She still sleeps in her chair most of the day.

(At about 4 PM I quit work, and began to prepare for my nap. I wanted Jane to lie down also, since she’d sat in her chair since about 7:30 this morning. She hadn’t even gone to the john—the same behavior she showed last Saturday, when a session had been held that night. Now Jane told me however, that she was feeling “panicky.” She’d been dozing in the chair and woke up feeling that way. It got worse. I could see that she had no intention of lying down. “God, I’m scared,” she said several times, but couldn’t say why she felt that way, at first. Then she said she thought her fright was connected to her fear of abandonment as a child—and that she would finally make life so miserable for me that I’d leave her.

(I replied that if I was involved in that fashion, then I had to be a late link in a long chain of such fears. I wasn’t denying that I could be so involved. I said Jane’s mother had been abandoned by her father, that her grandparents had also been separated through bitter argument, and that Jane herself had often been threatened with such a fate by her mother. Also—because of the nature of her own psychic work, Jane must feel abandoned by the literary establishment—and even society in general—no matter if certain people do buy her books. She’s far from being accepted by the ruling elite of our country, at least at this time. It all fit together, I said. All of this is very simplified from our discussion, which must have lasted a couple of hours. Neither of us slept.

(“I might have to cry, to relieve myself of some of this tension,” she said. “Go ahead,” I replied. “The world won’t stop turning on its axis....” She made a few aborted attempts at tears, but they didn’t come. Her feelings of panic continued as I got supper ready, but she ate pretty well. After supper she told me to come out for the session at 8:15, but I was still working on these notes at 8:45, and she hadn’t called me.