“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last Thursday I finished the final pen-and-ink drawing of the 40 I’d planned for Jane’s book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time.¹ I spent Friday checking the batch, then on Saturday morning I mailed them to Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor at Prentice-Hall. That afternoon we talked with a real estate agent, Debbie [not her real name], whom we’ve known for some time. Sunday we rested. And today we began house hunting.²

(From the outside only, Jane and I inspected several homes in Elmira. The first one we looked at — a bungalow on a Foster Avenue — intrigued us considerably. Our interest was hardly coincidental, though. Debbie had pointed out a photograph of it in a local real estate catalog, and we were quite aware that it bore a good resemblance to the house we’d considered buying in Sayre, Pennsylvania, in the spring of 1974.³ Besides being bungalows, both houses were of about the same age, and even of similar colors.

(Jane and I were also interested in the fact that we’d seldom been on Foster Avenue, even though it lay within comfortable walking distance of the apartment house we lived in on Water Street; nor could either of us recall having noticed the “Foster Avenue place” before. We speculated that we’d “homed in on it” now, as if for the first time, because our combined focus was opening up in the direction of homes.

(That concentration upon places to live reminded us of families, of course — “regular” families as well as Seth’s families of consciousness. While I drove us back to our apartment house for supper we discussed the incredibly complicated roles and events surrounding those different kinds of organizations — whereupon Jane came up with a most apt phrase: “The genealogy of events….” She laughed, then added: “As families of people have their genealogies, so do families of events.”⁴

2. Every so often I’ve referred to the inconveniences of apartment living for us, especially those involving that ever-present, ever-growing traffic noise. During break for the 726th session, which was held on December 16, 1974, I wrote that we planned to start looking for a house of our own as soon as I finished the illustrations for Dialogues. Our need for a certain kind of privacy and quiet has become very strong. At the same time, we want to avoid the sense of isolation that might result if we move into the country. I’d probably like that, but realized some time ago that such a situation would bother Jane considerably.

The 726th session was held on a Monday night, and was the last one for “Unknown” Reality for the year. During a private session on the Wednesday night following, Seth had a few things to say relative to our upcoming house adventures:

“Give us a moment … Do not buy a house with a dirt cellar. Do not buy a house heated by oil. The fumes are not good. A house facing the east is good in your section of the country. Use your psychic abilities to ascertain the house’s atmosphere, by all means — and no matter how fine it seems, do not buy it if you do not feel comfortable inside. It should have a fireplace because of the reminders of the hearth. It should not be sided with aluminum or other metal. In your area it should not face the south. This also has to do with the ways you use energy, so these are not general precepts for others to follow. Check with your pendulums.

“Even in the country, houses can have a closed quality if the mountains or trees press too tightly. The land that you own is important, but the visible land that you do not own is also, and you should be in sight of a mountain or some open area, while still having a private ‘secret’ area also.”

5. In very gentle ways, Jane did eventually use some of Seth’s impressions relative to both people — but cast in her own vernacular — for Chapter 18 of Politics. In that chapter she also began presenting, again from her viewpoint, material on our house-hunting activities; she plans to continue doing so in subsequent chapters.