“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.

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.

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.