“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 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.)

(10:12. Jane’s delivery had been somewhat faster than usual. While we talked now she interrupted herself to say that she “got in a flash” the main activities, the predominant slants of consciousness, of the next three families on Seth’s list: the Milumet, the Zuli, and the Borledim. Yet when she tried to describe their attributes for me she had difficulty in doing so; the information was peculiarly evanescent, she said.

(She did remember that Milumet represented many mystics, then added rather humorously that she didn’t think the name fit the activity — she thought Zuli a much better mystical appellation. All of this, of course, while Jane herself is a Sumari mystic.³ But some mystical differences began to emerge when Seth resumed dictation at 10:40.)

(11:05. Jane said the sounds of traffic rising up from the corner just southwest of our second-floor apartment had bothered her after last break, and that in part this accounted for the shorter delivery. I’d been able to tell when her discomfiture started, I thought, for her once-rapid delivery slowed, then began to fluctuate.

(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.

1. Naturally, Seth’s material here began to sound very reminiscent of Jane’s and my own Sumari characteristics — especially those concerning the “mystical sense of connection with nature” that each of us feels, and our individual desires “to work in solitude.”

2. Now Seth began a rundown of the roles played by each of the families of consciousness as he’d listed them in the 732nd session. Note that he didn’t name any of them tonight, merely calling each one the “next family,” and so forth. Since Jane had already refreshed her memory of those psychic groupings before the session, and, presumably, would deliver Seth’s material on them in the proper order, I matched up their names with the successive blocks of data given in the session. Perhaps I should have double-checked by asking Seth to rename the families, in order, but I didn’t think it necessary.