“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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

When I speak in terms of counterparts, then, or of reincarnational selves and probable selves, I am saying that in the true symphony of your being you are violins, oboes, cymbals, harps — in other words, you are a living instrument through which you play yourself. You are not an instrument upon which you are played. You are the composer and the symphony. You play ballads, classical pieces, lyrics, operas. One creative performance does not contradict the others.

Some people structure their lives around their children, others around a career, or pleasure, or even pain. Again, these are simply certain focuses that you choose, that direct your experience. You can add other focuses while still retaining your own identity — indeed, enriching it.

Tasting those qualities to the utmost, from that framework the psyche probes the fires of vitality and being as experienced from that specific viewpoint, and the despondency can be more alive than an unprobed, barely experienced joy. In the same manner, certain individuals can and do choose life experiences that involve great tragedies. Yet those tragic lives are used as a focus point that actually brings into experience, through comparison, the great vitality and thrust of being.

(Still in the same intense manner:) This does not mean that a tragic life is more vital than a happy, simple one. It just means that each individual is involved in an art of living. There are different themes, instruments, melodies — but existence, like great art, cannot be confined to simple definitions.

This is obviously not the case with all suicides¹⁰ or would-be suicides, or all risk-takers. But those elements are there. A person who dies at 17 may have experienced much greater dimensions of living, in your terms, than someone who lives to be 82. Such people are not as unaware of those choices as it seems.

To some extent you can actualize portions of your own unknown reality, and draw them into the experienced area of your life. There is an obvious relationship between one note and another in a musical composition. Now in terms of physical families and in larger terms of countries, there is a relationship between realities, which constantly change as the notes do. To some extent your reality is picked up by your contemporaries. They accept it or not according to the particular theme or focus of their lives.

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.

And in a note for that session I wrote: “Years ago, when Jane and I began living in Sayre, Pennsylvania, not long after our marriage in 1954, I began telling myself that before I reached the age of 40 I’d know whether I wanted to concentrate upon writing or painting — but that if I’d failed to do so before that date, I would then decide upon one or the other of those creative arts. I turned 40 in 1959 — and chose painting.”