“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.

(Pause.) It was, then, at her behest to some strong degree that Joseph happened upon the (Markle) house in question, felt that he did indeed want it, and took the steps that he did in his reality.

The intent [that] Joseph’s mother had lives beyond the grave, in those terms. She still wants Joseph to have a house, and one that will be more fashionable and wealthy than her own. Now Mr. Markle, a wealthy businessman, also had strong artistic abilities. He was a dealer in precious stones and fine antiques. These qualities attracted Joseph’s mother, Stella, and with the situation as she set it up in that life she was impressed, knowing that the man’s talents would bring him wealth. His artistic leanings caused him to choose real estate people who had latent artistic abilities of their own.

The many directions possible for the species exist now. Joseph reacted on a cellular level in one respect. The cells recognized the probable reality involved,⁶ and he, Joseph, felt that he was “at home” (in the Markle place), and yet consciously could not explain the feeling. In certain terms his mother will feel vindicated if Joseph buys that house, but the choice is still his and Ruburt’s. If you pay more attention to what you think of as coincidences, you will discover another kind of order that underlies the recognized order you follow. This has all kinds of implications biologically as far as the species is concerned; you can perhaps understand, then, that there are also probable histories beneath your lives, individually and en masse.

(10:58. “I feel funny,” Jane said. Her trance had been very deep, her delivery rather fast for the most part. She inhaled repeatedly now, as though taking in extra air. “I was really out — he could have kept me under for four hours …” She explained that just before the session began she’d received glimmerings of the material to come, but hadn’t had time to tell me about it. Certainly neither of us bad expected Seth to go into the affair involving the two houses in Sayre.

(As of now we think it unlikely that we’ll buy either of the houses. We haven’t asked Seth what to do, and do not plan to. There are more “coincidences” involved than those Seth described tonight, none of them consciously known to Jane and me before the Sayre adventure: Mr. Markle is in a nursing home but a few miles from where we live in Elmira, and my mother spent her last days in a similar home less than 15 miles away; one of Mr. Markle’s children lives in Elmira, and is connected with a store Jane and I have visited; Mr. Johnson, of the real estate couple that conducted us about in Sayre, did sign painting and truck lettering as a younger man, as I did; he and I had several mutual acquaintances in Sayre, among them an older artist of some reputation — and now deceased — that we had known in our high school days; and so forth.

(Pause at 11:28. This was the end of book dictation. As we had requested that he do just before the session, Seth directed his final delivery to some other material for Jane and me. He finished at exactly midnight.

It’s an old, predominantly lower-middle-class railroad town that used to derive much of its importance from being a junction point for several major lines; yet it’s also the site of a well-known hospital and clinic that has continued to grow. Sayre’s population was probably less than 6,500 when my two brothers and I were growing up there, and it isn’t much more today. My family lived in the neighborhood Seth describes from 1922 (when I was 3 years old) to 1931 (when I was 12), then moved to the opposite end of town. I remember quite well that I was most reluctant to move; the young boy didn’t want to leave his friends and the surroundings he loved. My parents’ motives for moving were meaningless to me at the time. They bought the “new” house, however, and it remained in the family until 1972 — a year after my father’s death, a year before my mother was to die.

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.”