“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To say that my editor was surprised by the first eight chapters of my ESP book is putting it mildly. He’d had dealings with me before and knew me well enough to be personally interested. He wrote enthusiastic letters, but he was also worried about the book as it stood. My experiences proved that I’d been a medium all along without knowing it, he said, and this could invalidate the book’s premise—that the experiments would work for anyone to some extent, regardless of their psychic background.

“Don’t tell me, tell the publisher,” Rob said. “For the life of me I can’t understand why Seth’s emergence doesn’t make it a far better book than it would be otherwise.”

As it turned out, it was Seth’s part in the book that bothered the publisher. If I’d played down Seth’s importance and concentrated on some of the other experiments that were also proving successful, then the book would have a very good chance, the editor told me. The other experiments included daily predictions and dream recall; and our dream recall work already had shown us the validity of precognitive dreams.

I’m sure that most of us react ahead of time to some events, and I’ll have more to say about this later in the book. Since in all of these experiments Seth was helping us through actual suggestions and explanations as to how we perceive such information, I simply couldn’t minimize his importance just to get the ESP book published. To us, Seth and the Seth Material was making everything else possible.

Finally, though the editor was for the book, his publisher turned it down. I was really disappointed at losing the sale. As a result, I played around with the idea of publishing some of Seth’s ideas as my own and hiding their origin. This seemed dishonest, though, and I decided against it. Besides, I felt that the very fact of the sessions was psychologically fascinating, and brought up questions that were answered in the material itself. So I sent my eight chapters somewhere else, stopped work on the book for nearly a year, and devoted my working time to short stories which were published in various national magazines.

In 1964, though, when we wrote to Dr. Osis, the trance hadn’t achieved this depth, and I was just getting used to the idea of sitting down in sessions. During 1965 the Seth Material constantly accumulated at our twice weekly sessions. Early that year, Frederick Fell gave me a contract for the ESP book, and I had a deadline to meet.