“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.

(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.

(I had to laugh a bit, for Seth’s description of my mother’s thinking processes was so very characteristic of her.)

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 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.

As the two couples talked, it turned out that there were other “coincidences”: Ruburt and Joseph had recently thought of taking a weekend vacation at a particular resort motel, within the general area but not especially close by. This real estate couple had been forced to spend a night at the same resort due to poor weather, at a time when a psychic was featured as an entertainer.

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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

5. I’d say that Seth’s statement here, “It was her second choice,” calls for careful interpretation. Its possible implications escaped me during the session; otherwise I could have asked for some clarification then. Since I neglected to do so, I ended up rewriting this note a year later.

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 …