“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(So far, Jane and I haven’t been able to find a home that we intuitively feel is the right one, although the place on Foster Avenue has intrigued us considerably since we first saw it on February 3. [Since then we’ve looked at many other houses.] Last Thursday afternoon [February 13], Jane was busy with her creative writing class so I went house hunting alone. Without feeling any great curiosity I checked out one place we’d seen before: the hill house. Once again I thought it wouldn’t do for us. Jane agreed when I asked her about it at the supper table.⁷

(The next day, Friday, Jane had an auditory “psychic” experience of sorts about the Foster Avenue situation; Saturday morning we made a formal offer to buy the house in question. For our own reasons we offered a low price, and it was promptly refused. The rejection didn’t completely close out our interest here — or Seth’s either — but it did help us put the whole matter in better perspective. Note 8 covers Jane’s inner experience and the details surrounding our house offer. [At 12:06 this evening Seth also refers to Jane’s auditory intuition.]

The second house (on Foster Avenue in Elmira) was owned for years by the people who gave it its character. The large living room was so spacious just so that it could hold a grand piano. The man who owned the house thought of pianos as his art (he was in the business of selling them), and the living room was simply meant to set a piano off.

Your second real estate lady (Debbie), leading you unerringly to the Foster Avenue house, did so for the same reasons. She paints as a hobby.¹² You did not consciously pick out real estate people who had artistic connections, but you were led to them and they to you. You recognized each other’s characteristics.

The [other] couple also interested in the Foster Avenue house are musicians — attracted to it for the same reasons that you were. You would find their house in Sayre interesting. They are primarily teachers of music, however. Their purposes do not necessarily involve the same kind of privacy that you want, although they think it attractive.¹³

(Considering parallels, here’s another of the many “connections” that Jane and I have become aware of since we began our housing odyssey last year [already we’ve compiled a list of 30 similar relationships]: Three out of the four dwellings that in one way or another we’ve been seriously involved with possess driveways shared by next-door neighbors — Mr. Markle’s in Sayre; the apartment house we live in now; and the house in Elmira that we considered buying in 1964. Only the Foster Avenue place is exempt here. I see such connections as symbols running through our personal experiences.

The suburbs obviously will not suit you unless you find a house apart from others while in the same general area. You like both the [Sayre and Foster Avenue] houses thus far because their grounds set them apart from the neighbors and give clearly defined boundaries — very important to both of you.

The present owner, even, of the Foster house thinks of it as “work,” since she herself is a … working [real estate] person. Ruburt finds the rugs there out of place, however, because they do not fit in with his ideas of work areas. The owner, however, is quite proud of them. Her work in that respect is to decorate, and the rugs represent her idea of what belongs in the house.

7. Added later: See the notes on the hill house at the beginning of the 736th session. In them I wrote about the delay involved before Jane’s and my perceptions of that particular dwelling blossomed within our conscious minds in any meaningful way; the results of that joint metamorphosis are described in sessions 738–39. In the meantime, then, Seth’s material in this (737th) session deals only with the house on Foster Avenue, in Elmira, and — as discussed shortly — with Mr. Markle’s house in Sayre, Pennsylvania, since those two places were the ones we were consciously interested in at the moment. Seth made no predictions, about the hill house or any other, nor did we ask him to.

8. As she lay down for a nap last Friday afternoon, Jane asked her inner self to let her know what to do — specifically — about buying the house on Foster Avenue. She fell asleep, then drifted off into a relatively bland dream. Suddenly a male voice burst loudly through that dream fabric in a very intrusive way, saying only: “Wait a few days.”

Jane woke up. “That wasn’t Seth’s voice, but I recognized it as giving me the answer I wanted,” she told me later. “I had no doubt. It was even clearer because the dream, which I can hardly remember, was so vague. But even after I got the answer I was too worked up to follow it. I wanted to do something, take some action.” The result was that on Saturday we made our low offer for the Foster Avenue place, as described in the notes at first break. We did so mainly to relieve the psychic charges we’d built up concerning it, thinking that if we were so inclined later we could make a higher bid.

Our tactics were successful in freeing us, and I suspected that we were through with Foster Avenue. Since we’d achieved our goal here, we made no immediate plans to try to find out whether others would offer more for the house.

When Debbie took Jane and me through the Foster Avenue house on February 5, she told us that another couple — who live in Sayre, and whom I’ll call the Steins — had also inspected the property and planned to make an offer for it, while trying at the same time to sell their present home. Without thinking too much about it, we mentally filed this bit of news along with the connections that had developed out of our house-hunting episodes last year; even now, we still didn’t realize just how the complicated relationships between those events of April 1974, and now, were to continue growing. For instance: When Jane and I “rediscovered” Mr. Markle’s house in Sayre today (February 17), and saw to our considerable surprise that it might still be for sale, we at once visited the Johnsons, who had shown us through it last year. We were then in for another surprise — for the Johnsons are the agents in charge of selling the Steins’ residence in Sayre.

(I should add that the reasons Jane and I made our low bid for the Foster Avenue house were entirely unrelated to whatever offers the Steins, or anyone else, had made or might make for the place. See the notes for first break, and Note 8.)