“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(One of the first houses Jane and I looked at yesterday occupied a hill side corner lot in West Elmira, on a street we’d never been on before. Our friend in real estate, Debbie, had directed us to it from a photograph in the same catalog she’d used to point out the Foster Avenue place, which we had inspected Monday. In fact, both houses are pictured, one above the other, on the same page of the catalog. See the opening notes for the last session.

(The house that was for sale — and which we came to call the “hill house” — was empty and locked. There were other homes about, but each one had a feeling of privacy amid its thick insulation of trees. We rather casually surveyed the place in question from our car. At the time it didn’t “turn us on.” It bore no similarity to those in Sayre, or on Foster Avenue in Elmira. It was a ranch-style, cedar-sided dwelling that had just been painted a dark green — a conventional one-story affair with white shutters, a fireplace, a picture window, an attached double garage in back, and many trees and shrubs. Part of the front lawn was rather steeply banked, part of the curving flagstone walk was stepped as it rose up to the porch. The house faced the south; before it in the valley lay Elmira itself; almost hidden by trees; beyond the city the hills rose in tiers. Streets — without sidewalks — passed the hill house on but two sides, at the southwest corner, and each one dead-ended less than a block away. In back of the house to the north and east, woods rolled up the gentle curve of the hill and over its top.

(The above notes and my speculations to follow, all added later, look ahead to sessions 738–39 for February 19 and 24 respectively. I’m inserting the material here to continue the record of our house hunting in an orderly way, and to show how even an important perception [in this case of a house] can at first make hardly any conscious impression upon the perceiver — although here two perceivers, Jane and I, were involved.

(Now Jane’s and my psyches were involved in this other-than-conscious activity concerning the hill house for 16 days from the time we first saw it. During that period we held the 737th session [on February 17], but since we weren’t consciously concerned with that particular place then, we neither talked about it nor asked Seth to comment; instead, on his own during the session, Seth discussed the house on Foster Avenue as representing a probability, and a pretty likely one, that we could choose to explore. Seth didn’t suggest that we buy that particular place, and had he done so I’m fairly sure we’d have rejected the idea. Jane and I were free to make our own joint decision — and all the while, both of us were unconsciously processing the hill-house situation.

(Because we’d been looking at houses today, Jane was excited: “How am I going to get my mind on the session?” Just before Seth came through, she reread his list of the families of consciousness that he’d given for the 732nd session. She did so, I quickly learned, for both practical and intuitive reasons.)

Dictation: House information later if you want it. There is a tie-in here with Sumari characteristics.

(Seth returned at 11:19. For a couple of pages of notes he discussed the house we’d looked at on Foster Avenue two days ago. This material came through even though we had our first viewing of the “hill house” yesterday; see the notes [added later] at the beginning of tonight’s session. Seth’s information on the Foster Avenue place, and our present and potential relationships with it, was very illuminating. He helped explain the psychic attractions Jane and I feel for the house, without implying a commitment toward it [through purchase, for instance] in any way. Some of those present and potential relationships, incidentally, actually stem from our childhood days.

(Here’s one point brought out in that deleted material: Since Seth had told Jane and me long ago that the three of us belong to the Sumari family of consciousness,⁴ we were more than curious now when he declared that the woman who presently owns the house on Foster Street is also a Sumari: “[She] added Sumari characteristics of expansiveness.” But to go a step further: According to Seth the house’s previous owner for many years, a male now deceased, had also been Sumari. It’s quite intriguing to watch such psychic and physical connections unfold.