“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.

Joseph felt strong leanings toward Mr. Markle’s home. Though the price was quite high, Ruburt and Joseph thought about buying it, and were taken through the home by the real estate people. A coincidence — a mere trick of fate that Joseph could be walking through the old man’s home,² and that Mr. Markle would be spending his last time in a nursing home, as had Joseph’s mother — meaningless but evocative that this house was for sale, and that the old man was insisting upon a price higher than the house is worth, just as Joseph’s mother insisted upon a high price for her own home, and determined to get it.³ Period. That is how it looked from the outside. It appeared to be one of life’s curious incidents.

Even now she wants Joseph to have a finer home than either of his brothers has — (emphatically and amused:) you can cut that if you want.

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 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.

(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.

In certain terms it is the connection, the symbol, between the two probability systems, for Mr. Markle’s house also has a shared drive. Ruburt and Joseph live in double apartments, in a large old mansion redone into such quarters. The driveway is shared with a very wealthy family next door, in which the same size house is a home to one family. Joseph’s mother wanted Joseph to be very wealthy. The drive symbolically connects the two realities, and is a point where the two merge.

3. Not only did my mother insist “upon a high price for her own home,” but to the surprise of everyone involved in the sale — family members, real estate agents, and others — she succeeded in getting it.

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 …