“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Just before she went into trance, Jane said to me: “I’ve got something fascinating for you …”)

(Her eyes dark, Jane held up her empty glass.)

Give us a moment … (Jane, as Seth, took the time to light a cigarette.)

(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.

(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.

1. Jane and I took our drive three weeks ago, on April 7. The town of Sayre is only 18 miles from Elmira, N.Y., where we live now, and it sits in the beautiful Pennsylvania hills between two smaller communities — Athens to the south, and Waverly to the north in New York State. Locally the three are known as “The Valley.” We visit Sayre occasionally. Although it’s close by as far as miles go, for me important aspects of it are far away in terms of years.

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.

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.”

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 …