“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

New paragraph: Even in your private lives, however, there are clues as to other kinds of sequences in which events can occur — and do. You are usually unaware of the significance of such hints. They pass beneath your notice simply because they do not fit the ordered sequence with which you are familiar. In your idea of reality such clues appear insignificant. They make no sense, particularly in the ordered scheme of reality generally recognized.

She often dreamed of living in it. On a mental level and an emotional one, she used that probability in this life to enrich her own hours through daydreaming — but without, of course, any realization that those daydreams had their own reality.

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 real estate couple (the Johnsons) were also connected. Again, the official mind says that it was a coincidence that this couple were, in their way, artistically inclined, enjoyed painting and writing, free-lanced, and still lived in an apartment after some years of marriage — and that the man was relatively quiet in contrast to the woman (with amusement). Yet again probabilities merge, for the woman could well have been a writer, the man an artist; and seeing Ruburt and Joseph, they related with other probabilities inherent in their own natures.

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.

This psychic startled the couple by correctly identifying some specific elements of their experiences, so there was some kind of psychic connection also. Again, of course, coincidence. So says the officially organized mind. The rich interweavings of probabilities are apparent in all of your lives if only you stop organizing your perceptions and experience in prepackaged ways (emphatically).

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.

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.

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.

4. In his Preface, Seth discusses the relationship between my mother’s death and his beginning “Unknown” Reality; in sessions 679–80, some of my mother’s probable lives; and in Session 683, my contacts with her in the dream state. See the appropriate notes for each session.

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 …