“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.

(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.

Her own psychology and characteristic methods of behavior are still hers, however, and operate, so that “she” “tunes into” those areas of probabilities that concern her own desires and interests. In this system she wanted Joseph to have her own house (see Note 1), but for many reasons that did not develop.

(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.

If your mother did not get the man and the wealth, then — to her way of thinking, now — you can still get the house that she fantasized was her own during her life.

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.”

(Pause at 10:33.) The second house had no garage, and was not in as fashionable a neighborhood, but it had its own elegance. It made Ruburt, now, laugh, with its odd nooks and crannies. Give us a moment … That house did not have the weight of Stella’s intent upon it, yet it was also a house that she had noticed, thinking it more grand than her own — one in which she could have been happy. It was her second choice.⁵

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.

(We haven’t talked a great deal about the probable ramifications inherent in the whole house episode — rather, we expected such concepts to operate if the Seth material has any validity. Our ways of thinking have changed considerably since these sessions began over a decade ago. Every so often Jane and I remind ourselves of just how much of a change there has been for each of us; this helps us relate our individual worlds to those of others. Neither of us believes in chance or coincidence in usual terms, for instance — nor have we since Seth began discussing the elements behind such qualities some years ago. We always assign reasons, even if they’re hidden at times, for any action. [And often, we’ve discovered, further observation will bear out those reasons.] This way of thinking led to our taking the chain of circumstances involving the two houses almost for granted; each unfolding had seemed to fall so effortlessly into place that deep questioning hadn’t been called for “Oh, of course — things would work out that way …”

(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.

(Then Seth went into another “house connection” after break ended at 11:24:)

Give us a moment … The apartment house in which Ruburt and Joseph presently reside has a shared driveway.

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.

(A note: Since the next session was held before I was through typing this one from my notes, I can add that in the 694th session Seth deals with some of the obvious questions we had about my mother’s role in our house affairs.)

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.

2. The “real estate people” who showed Jane and me through the Markle place last Thursday, April 25, are a husband-and-wife team who operate a small real estate and insurance agency in Sayre. We liked the Johnsons (although that isn’t their real name) at once. Going through Mr. Markle’s house was quite an experience — certainly I hadn’t expected to find myself doing so now, some 43 years after the last time I’d been in it. Jane wasn’t attracted to it as much as I was, of course, so that knowledge helped keep my own enthusiasm in check. From my grade-school days I thought I remembered the house’s large living room especially; for the Markles had raised two children who were contemporary with my next youngest brother and me; sometimes the four of us met at the house, then went to school together.

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.

Now when Jane and I drive over those modest streets, I feel a sense of familiarity and strangeness that’s hard to describe. Curbs or no, the neighborhood has changed remarkably little considering the number of years involved. I tell myself that all of the trees are much taller and thicker now, and I experience an odd wonder that the wooden houses are still standing. I also tell myself that many others must have similar feelings about environments that were once important to them — and that, indeed, still are. But since becoming acquainted with Seth’s ideas of time, I’m more than ever conscious that when we journey there’s much more involved than a trip through space.

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.”

And yet — tiny possibilities existed in spite of all this logic. My mother could have had some emotional connection to this second house.

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 …