“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your mother loved physical reality and took the greatest pleasure in its most minute aspects, for all of her complaints. Your father loved it but never trusted it. Each of your parents had their strongest reality, this time, and in your terms, in a probable system of reality — and here (in this reality) they were offshoots. To them this system always seemed strange.²

In another system of reality your father was — in fact, still is — a well-known inventor, who never married but used his mechanically creative abilities to the fullest while avoiding emotional commitment. He met Stella (my mother). They were going to be married — and in terms of years, the same years are involved, historically. At one time, then, in your father’s past as you think of it, having met Stella, he did not marry her after all. His love was for machinery, the speed of motorcycles, mixing creativity with metal. At that point of intersection, equal desires and intents within him became like twin nuclei. Whole regroupings of energy occurred, psychological and psychic implosions, so that two equally valid personalities were aware in a world in which only one could live at a time.

This was a great fulfillment on his part, for the inventor did not trust himself to feel much emotion, much less give birth to emotional beings. In that other probability in which your parents originally met, your mother married a doctor, became a nurse, and helped her husband in his practice. She became an independent woman, and — again in your historical context — when it took some doing for a woman to distinguish herself.

Her energy was such that it spilled over into this system with your father, however. Someday I will try to explain this more clearly, in terms of energy patterns. Historically, however, many probabilities exist at once. When your mother died in her 50’s in one probable system, your mother in this system was the recipient of energy that then returned.

(Some quick figuring showed us that the 50’s for my mother had encompassed the years 1942–51. From my present viewpoint I had no idea if she’d consciously or unconsciously experienced any influx of energy resulting from the death of a probable self during that decade. In those days the Buttses didn’t think in such terms, for one thing; for another, I was absent from the family home in Sayre for much of that time. In 1947, for example, when my mother was 55 years old, I was 28 and living in New York City. I wasn’t to meet Jane for five years. And even if Stella Butts were still living, I think it would be difficult to question her about an event that would have taken place approximately a quarter of a century ago.

(I told Jane now that had my mother received any additional energy during her 50’s, she might have expressed its benefits through the habitual mores of our society, in terms of changes rather than of probabilities, say “My life changed for the better at that point, when I made that decision.” I added that perhaps the important thing for us now was to observe our unfolding lives with Seth’s ideas of the larger, or whole self, in mind, and so achieve insights we could interpret in terms of probabilities. So we decided not to ask Seth to backtrack and give us material about the son my mother’s probable self had had in her reality, even though that son was a probable self of mine.

(To me again:) Your birth (in 1919) coincided with the birth of your mother’s child in that other reality, hence her stronger feelings toward you. Your birth, and that of your youngest brother (Richard) were highly charged for her — yours for the reasons just given, and your brother’s because it represented the time of your mother’s hysterectomy in that other reality. In this reality, Richard’s birth represented your father’s final attempt to deal with emotional reality. Both of your parents imbued the third son with the strongest emotional qualities of their natures. Your mother had him defiantly, after the usual childbirth age (she was 36) almost reacting against that [probable] hysterectomy. In this world, she could and would have another child.

2. I think that as a child I often sensed my parents’ feelings of strangeness about this reality, although I was quite unable to express myself in those terms. Perhaps I’m reinterpreting old memories in the light of Seth’s material here. Consciously, however, I knew nothing then about probable realities or the power of belief; I was just acutely aware of the unending differences of opinion between my mother and father, and of my unformed questions about the reasons for their behavior; at the same time I saw them struggling to live like others I knew. I don’t think I even discussed my confused feelings with my brothers as we grew older. On several occasions Seth has given very blunt, very perceptive interpretations of the churning relationship involving my parents. That material is too long and complex to excerpt here, but I’d like to treat it separately sometime.

I do know a deeper compassion for my parents now than I did when they were alive. To paraphrase a remark one of my brothers made recently, I miss them in ways I couldn’t have anticipated before their deaths. Each of them died at the age of 81 — my father in 1971, my mother in 1973. For those who are interested, I drew a likeness of my father for one of my pen-and-ink illustrations in Jane’s Dialogues, and incorporated an image of my mother in another one. See pages 89 and 137 of that book.

The Butts family albums contain numerous photographs of my father as a young man, many of them self-taken with the aid of a timer; he poses with a variety of automobiles and motorcycles through the years before his marriage to my mother in 1917, and afterward, too. Sometimes he’d assembled the vehicles himself, or modified them in his own ways. In 1922 he took his wife and children (I was 3 years old, Linden not yet 2) on a six-month motor trip from the East Coast to California. When our touring car broke a rear axle on a remote dirt road in Montana, he fashioned a substitute in a blacksmith shop.