“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.

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.

Your cellular structure is innately able to follow such sequences. Believing such clues to be meaningless, the conscious mind does not perceive them, or calls them coincidences. Such clues in your intimate daily life, however, looked at in a different way, can tell you much about the potentials of the species, and give you glimpses of other systems of reality in which human consciousness can respond. I am here using an incident from the experience of Ruburt and Joseph, but the reader can make his or her own correlations, and discover like events from which the same conclusions can be drawn.

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.

(Humorously:) Now, all probabilities are related. Joseph’s mother is dead, in your terms, and aware to some extent of the nature of her own reality beyond the physical. She is able, again to some extent, to follow through with her own probable existences. That is, she is conscious of her own being outside of the official framework.⁴

(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.

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.

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.

The neurologically unrecognized orders can show themselves once you recognize their reality. Then your sense data will begin to confirm what has not been confirmed thus far.

(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.

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.