“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We skipped last week’s two regularly scheduled sessions so that Jane could rest, and so we’d have more time to spend house hunting. House notes and material are presented after first break. Jane did hold ESP class on Tuesday night, February 11, though.

(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.]

(Then in Sayre, Pennsylvania, this afternoon [Monday the 17th], we found ourselves participating in house-related developments that took us back in time more than nine months.⁹ Jane and I don’t believe in coincidences. We’d considered the Sayre episodes finished last year; yet today the echoes of those earlier events were so prominent that I came to think of them as actual projections from the past into the present, and so into the future, in a most practical manner. Today Jane and I very clearly felt those connections — or probabilities, if one chooses — developing. Seth remarks upon some of them after break, but the best we can offer are a few hints; otherwise all of these house notes would be much longer.

(Jane had declared before the session began tonight that she thought Seth would go into our house affairs in connection with probable realities, but that such material wouldn’t go with his book dictation on the families of consciousness. I facetiously replied that if the information didn’t fit into “Unknown” Reality we’d “force it to.” I was only half putting her on. Anything on our house hunting, I thought, would be welcome here because it would help unite these late sessions for “Unknown” Reality with some of its much earlier ones [in Volume 1, as it turned out]. It almost seemed as though we’d planned things this way.

Your house hunting serves, however, as an excellent example of the ways in which Sumari are attracted to other Sumari, even in connection with probabilities in your system. The same relationships could be seen with other family interconnections. You have already noticed a similarity in the two houses thus far that have attracted your attention.

The first (in Sayre), mentioned far earlier in “Unknown” Reality, you thought was definitely sold, and today you discovered that the sale was not that final.¹⁰ As you discussed these issues a rather important main point escaped your minds: The man who owned the first house (Mr. Markle) was a dealer in antiques and precious stones, utterly devoted to his work and engrossed in it, considering it his art. The house has a garden on one side, with high trees, and a yard on the other, and was relatively shielded. The man’s family took second place to some extent. The kitchen and dining areas were small. He had his office downstairs and he often worked at home. His art came first.¹¹

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.

Again, you have a small kitchen, a garden and some sheltered privacy. Both homes appealed to you, however, because the people who lived in them organized their houses about their work. This is what you picked up and reacted to. You did not react to the attitudes of others in those families who “had to put up with those conditions,” because to you they are natural.

Neither house expresses your own particular individualistic ways of life, of course, but each one comes close enough to intrigue you, and either one could be made to suit your purposes quite easily. You were attracted also because the people who put their greatest imprint upon those houses so shared some of your tendencies. In the second house your ideas of privacy were shown to you, carried to an extreme, where the windows would not even open. In the first house the stairs to the second floor were purposely steep, and never altered, because no one was invited to view the private family bedrooms. The stairs were meant to be formidable.

As mentioned much earlier, the real estate couple who showed you the first house, in Sayre (see Note 11), have definite artistic leanings. The woman particularly likes the house, and thought you would. She identified with your ideas of art and work, and saw a probable variation of herself happily ensconced in such surroundings.

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.

(11:25.) Now: When you make any important decision you automatically rouse all portions of your psyche. You set probabilities into motion. The kind of decision to some extent organizes the patterns. This should be obvious. But when you decide to move you are putting yourself in league with others who also make the same decision. Someone who moves will leave a house or an apartment vacant for someone else to move into. Unconsciously, then, the movers are in league with each other. There are sympathetic probabilities set up.

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

You find typical ranch-style homes, generally now, uncomfortable because — and this should be obvious — they are given over mainly to family living of a particular kind, colon: a kind that obviously separates work from living areas. Work is definitely done outside of the house.

Since you both work at home, those houses do not fit you, generally speaking.¹⁴ Work is not incorporated into daily family life, but certainly exists apart from it — something you find, each of you, relatively inconceivable. You can see farms better, though you are not farmers, simply because there also work and home life are one.

Both houses, therefore, still exist in your practical present as probable acquisitions, because you have not dismissed them. Years ago (in 1964), you were interested in another house (also in Elmira); again, it had been owned by an artist. A coincidence? Hardly.

I suggested that you take it (but see my note in the material at next break). It would have been good for you both, but you were afraid of it, and your feelings had much to do with the contract being turned down (by the Veteran’s Administration). That house represented what each of you thought of as unbridled, undisciplined creativity. It was dirty and cluttered. The artist had children who ran about without any control. There was much playfulness there, however, that could have tempered some of your great mutual seriousness at the time. You did not choose to accept such a probability then, any more than you could have accepted my advice all the way. The authorities turned the contract down — but the authorities stood for the inner disciplinarians, and you did not want to share your road with the world; nor did you want, later, to share your driveway (for the Sayre house) with your neighbor.

(11:43. I told Jane that, once heard, much of Seth’s material had the quality of being so obvious that we in turn seemed to be quite opaque not to have reached the same conclusions ourselves. After considering the alternatives Seth suggested immediately following last break I decided to leave his delivery in place in the session as a guide for the reader; parallels can be drawn with many other situations, I think having nothing to do with art or houses.

(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.

(A clarification: Seth didn’t actually suggest that Jane and I buy the “1964 house.” His statements just before break that he did so are distortions on Jane’s part, I would say, while speaking for him tonight; even in trance, her memory could have been in error — or she could have been touching upon another probable reality. What Seth did talk about, and quite legitimately, were the benefits we’d enjoy if we did acquire that place. He discussed the whole affair in the 65th session for Sunday, June 28, 1964, using passages like: “I am certainly not going to make any decisions for you. The house you looked at today should prove an excellent buy …” and, “If you purchase the house …” and, “You will have to make your own decisions.”¹⁵

Now: You chose your present neighborhood particularly because when you moved here (from Sayre in 1960) it was highly professional. Work and home were united. The dentist next door lives and works in the same house. So did the other dentist around the corner, and the chiropractor beside him. There was a uniting factor that you recognized, where of office and home were in the same location.

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.

Give us a moment … Because there are such inner connections as mentioned (at 11:25), your intents are going outward, to be picked up by others. (With emphasis:) It would take a book to probe into the probabilities alone being roused at this time, for example, by all of those interested in either of those two houses.

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.

Another point, however: Both houses also have built-in bookcases — physical versions, in other words, of Ruburt’s library. If you want the entire explanation now you can have it. Otherwise —

All right. (Louder.) My heartiest regards, you house hunters, you.

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.”

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.

As Jane wrote at about this time in her manuscript for Psychic Politics: “So in house hunting I can almost feel the shape of my ideas and beliefs looking for their proper house.” My opening notes for sessions 714–15 each include material on Jane’s psychic library, and Seth himself discussed it in the latter session. Politics, of course, contains extensive material on the same subject (as well as on our house-hunting adventures).

It might be added later here that on succeeding days Jane had several more auditory-type experiences, all involving topics other than houses or “Unknown” Reality. In none of those episodes was she aware of Seth’s voice, per se, but even so we see relationships between them and the time she did hear his voice; see my description of that event at the beginning of the 710th session.

10. This afternoon Jane and I had spontaneously decided to lay our work aside and go for a drive. We needed the brief change. Neither of us had any conscious intentions of making the trip to Sayre, which lies just across the New York State border in Pennsylvania, some 18 miles east and south of Elmira. We found ourselves doing so, however; we also found ourselves driving past the house we’d considered buying there last year. I received a distinct shock of surprise when I saw the familiar “For Sale” sign still tacked to the front of the house. So did Jane — although she’s never been drawn to it in the way that I am. We’d been informed months ago that the place had been sold. This new joint perception of ours set a whole group of events into motion — all of which were connected to those described in sessions 693–94 (see Note 9).

11. The Johnsons, the husband-and-wife real estate team who had taken us through Mr. Markle’s house in April 1974, gave us the objective information in this paragraph. I could verify those facts myself, and add a bit to them, for even 43 years later I remembered Mr. Markle and his family well. Prior to 1931, the Buttses and the Markles lived only a block apart; in Volume 1, see Note 2 for the 693rd session.

13. Here Seth touches upon several ramifications involving our house affairs that I’ve been saving to present all at once, if briefly. This note, then, will enlarge upon the fertile field of connections, or probabilities, that is enveloping Jane and me, the houses in Sayre and Elmira, the real estate agents we’ve been dealing with (the Johnsons and Debbie — who are not acquainted), and some other people.

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.)

14. A couple of weeks later I felt considerable humor upon rereading Seth’s statement here: See the notes about the hill house, inserted at the beginning of the 736th session.

15. A note added later: Another house connection is that the place Jane and I were drawn to in 1964 perches on a hillside just west of Elmira proper, as does the hill house. The two are separated in our experience of time by 11 years, but their physical existence is simultaneous: They lie within walking distance of each other — less than half a mile apart — on the north side of the same highway.