“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(These notes will recapitulate two rather surprising events. While we were having last Saturday’s session, someone knocked on our door; I didn’t answer it and they left. Sunday they returned: Rusty and Dr. Hal from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on their yearly visit to us with a cheesecake. As the four of us talked for an hour or so two things emerged. Dr. Hal had a teacher many years ago, a woman, who used to walk with William James; indeed, he read part of his Varieties of Religious Experience to her. James also discussed his own psychic experiences with this woman. Hal told us her name but we forgot to note it down. Interesting, that this information would come to us just as Jane is preparing her James manuscript for Prentice.

(It wasn’t until after the Canadian couple had left us, actually, that the implications of what had happened began to sink in. I thought the odds alone staggering that it had happened at all. During their visit the woman, Carol, several times expressed the thought that she returned the second time, to see if we were home, because “it was meant to be,” or words to that effect. She also said that if we hadn’t been home, that was meant to be also. Carol had met an individual named Ron who had visited us here at 1730 two years or so ago—not long after we’d moved in, incidentally. Jane and I haven’t seen Miss Dineen except once soon after Miss Callahan’s death at least 10 years ago. Personally, I do not think I would know her if we met.

This is not dictation. Let us look at the simple event involving your two visitors.

You have then two separate people living in different countries, completely unknown to each other, of different ages and backgrounds. In Framework 2 however, again, time and space are not barriers, and there are no impediments in usual terms. Laws of attraction operate in far too complicated ways to explain with any real preciseness. Emotional computations and associations occur there with incalculable rapidity. Data is sorted out, arranged and rearranged, as if associations were tabulated and retabulated under a million different headings.

Using such “a psychic computer,” information was sorted and resorted, probabilities examined, some discarded because the conditions were not apropos. Miss Dineen this evening was looking for a small adventure. She met two delightful strangers—near-foreigners. She will tell the story to friends. The meeting then originally was “planned” in Framework 2. In case your young visitor—the woman (Carol) now—did not meet you, she had insisted in her mind that she would meet someone who knew you or had some personal connection somehow.

Remember—you two were involved, with your probabilities and free will. Until Ruburt was at his desk this evening, he did not finally decide whether or not he would greet the strangers you knew had earlier tried to reach you. He played with the idea of checking some notes, and then taking his chapter (on James) to the living room table, and darkening his room. In that case, the young woman would still have met someone who had a connection with him.

At the last moment, however, before you left, Ruburt made up his mind and told you to unlock the porch door. (When Carol opened the screen door, she let Willy Two out, but picked him up easily.) Miss Dineen remembers you kindly also because of Miss Callahan, of course.

Later, for the book, I will use this sort of explanation to show for example how various groups of people, planning say a vacation to one spot, will all choose two or three airplanes for the journey—knowing unconsciously quite well that one very well might crash, even though the final decision is not made until the last moment.

She did in fact go to a bookstore, but in so doing she killed two birds with one stone, so to speak, for she found your address in the phone book, but also just happened to run into Miss Dineen—and that was something that only a thorough canvassing of the town might produce.

(11:56 PM. As I typed the session the next day, I told Jane I was quite enthused by it. Somehow the two incidents described, involving Rusty and Hal, and Carol and Fred, had served to impress upon me the validity of Seth’s ideas about Frameworks 1 and 2 in ways that the intellectual understanding of those concepts alone hadn’t done. I found myself trying out the concepts as I worked—and they worked. I may regard the session as a key or breakthrough session, then. I told Jane I wanted to discuss it thoroughly with her when I had it finished. It seems that we can put the concepts of the frameworks to use in all areas of daily life, reinforce longtime goals, etc.