“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

New paragraph. Driving through Sayre,¹ Pennsylvania, one Sunday afternoon, Joseph noticed a house for sale in a neighborhood he knew — and remembered that it had belonged, in his memory, to a man of whom his mother had been fond. On impulse, Joseph had Ruburt call the real estate firm whose sign was on the house. The house was still owned by the man in question. Joseph only remembered his mother speaking of this gentleman in the past. In the recognized reality shared by the Butts family there had been no intimate contact between Joseph’s mother and Mr. Markle (as I’ll call him). Joseph’s mother had been greatly struck by the man, however, and was convinced that she could have married him instead of the husband she had chosen. Through the years she fantasized such a situation. Mr. Markle was, and is, wealthy. Now of course he is an old man, unable to tend to his home any longer. He is now in a home for the aged, but well cared for.

(10:12.) Instead you have a rich interweaving of probabilities; for in one probability the two were indeed married, and that Stella [Butts] saw the house go to the eldest son (myself). In this probability, this Joseph instead comes upon the house of a relative stranger, finds it for sale, and can or cannot purchase it according to the new set of probabilities then emerging. There is a cross-blending of “effects.” In this probability Joseph’s mother left little in financial terms, relatively speaking, and her house was sold. The family did not get it.

New paragraph: This is, however, a clear case of the interweaving of probabilities. In this one Joseph can choose whether to buy or not, so there is no coercion (by Stella Butts), for example. Joseph and Ruburt were also shown a second house in Sayre — one a good deal cheaper, but generally much like the one in which Joseph’s mother lived in this life. They saw both houses on the same day. The second, like the first, was for sale because of age. An elderly couple recently moved from the second house to a home for the aged. Again, the “official” mind says, “Coincidence. All of this is quite natural: Many homes are for sale because the elderly can care for them no longer.”

The house the Butts family had occupied at that time is situated just around the corner, a block away — almost visible from the front porch of the Markle place. (Later I found several old photographs of it in one of our family albums, and was reminded that in those days the streets had no curbs.) Even today I can recall most of the families, and their children, who’d lived in the immediate area. Those few blocks largely made up my childhood world.

At the time of the session I understood Seth to mean that the second house Jane and I looked at on April 25 was also my mother’s second choice of the day for us. Sometime later we began to wonder whether he might have meant that this second house had been Stella Butts’s next best choice for herself over the years, after Mr. Markle’s. We took the conservative approach; we decided this wasn’t likely. For not only would both houses have to be for sale at the same time, and not only would Jane and I have to inspect them on the same day — but of the hundreds of houses in Sayre, it would be necessary that these two had ranked first and second in my mother’s preference for many years. The odds against this last point coinciding with the first two points would be very great. We thought that the two houses were already involved in a remarkable-enough series of “coincidences.”

The place in question is located within a few blocks of the neighborhood to which my family moved in 1931, as described in Note 1. Since it sits on one of the main streets of Sayre, at a busy corner, I know that I must have passed by it many times in subsequent years; yet I’d never noticed the house as an individual entity until Jane and I walked up to its front door with the Johnsons. When the Johnsons told us who the owners were, I could only reply that I’d heard the name while living in Sayre; the old couple would be contemporary with my mother. Although I couldn’t remember my mother mentioning them, it was at least possible that she’d known them. There could have been links through mutual friends. To some small extent, then, Jane and I could toy with inferences drawn from Seth’s comment that that particular house had represented my mother’s second choice. I could hardly ask her, since she’d died five months ago, but Stella Butts could have known the owners, and been in their home; she could have liked it inordinately …