“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In many ways history is your built-in past, the obvious events that are significant. All of the different variations that can be played upon human consciousness, all of the racial probabilities, are in one way occurring in ages past — but they are also happening in what you think of as your present. As mentioned earlier (in sessions 680–82), your consciousness seizes upon certain events over others and brings these into significance, and therefore into the official reality that you know.

(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 …”

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.”