“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Give us a moment … You both seem informal, yet your informality exists within its own rather formal structure. The places so far have had a certain formality, within which, in contrast, you are informal. The formality of the position of the house upon its hill provides a structure of its own. The same house on low land would not suffice, you see. It is the entire picture that is important. You do not understand your own mixtures of order and spontaneity, formality and informality.

It is highly important that you move. You both do need privacy for your work and because of your natures, but this does not mean that you should try to find a place with no [distractions] within miles. It does mean that you settle for a reasonable amount of privacy, in that you do not carry the idea to extremes.

The Foster house represents many things, and though it is not on a hill it stands for your feelings of secrecy and privacy. The windows do not open. It is dark, yet it is large, and, in its way, elegant. The hill house has some privacy. It does not have secrecy, and while you have a view you cannot hide in it. It is too contemporary.

The Foster Avenue house has a certain decadence. Do you follow me?

The hill house does not. It represents a kind of challenge you have thus far not accepted. As given, however, it still possesses qualities that do go in with your natures.

Give us time … When you live in a house that belongs conspicuously to another age, you are to some extent avoiding the contemporary nature of life. Ruburt may find himself furnishing the place more formally than another one, yet the open quality of the air is the kind that you do not hide in.

(“I know. I said before the session that if we got house material I really wanted good answers, that I’d stay out of it as much as possible. …” Jane went into the kitchen, looking for matches. All in all, I thought she was “recovering” quite easily from Seth’s data, and that she was helped here because we’d revisited the hill house today. Every so often someone wants to know about the extent to which we follow Seth’s advice or information, and I suppose a good answer is that we may decide to go along with it if it suits our conscious purposes to do so. Sometimes we don’t agree with what Seth tells us even when we know it’s good counsel. [However, Jane and I freely admit that on occasion we’ve made the wrong choice in deciding to ignore what Seth had to say; in retrospect we’ve seen that he gave out very valid material.]

(Then at 11:21, here presented verbatim:) Now a note: I do not want to get into family variations, but Sue Watkins picked up a variation of the Gramada family of consciousness (the Grunaargh) — quite legitimate, and at the time very good on her part.⁴ People love to make divisions. There are then what you can call subfamilies, combinations, highly creative. All divisions are simply for the purpose of organizations of consciousness. The families mix and interrelate, so that you could indeed subdivide them, but for my purpose there is little point to this.

As the physical races mix, so do the psychic ones. Every once in a while, in your terms, a new family forms out of such subgroups. So the families are meant to be understood as general categories into which earth-tuned consciousnesses fall more or less naturally.

Now it is fairly unusual to be half Italian and half Chinese, though it is possible; so some of the psychic families join more easily with certain others, and some who are very sympathetic to each other find it quite difficult to blend. The “natural earth parents” [the Borledim] and the Sumari, for instance, are very close, and yet have great difficulty in merging, because one considers the family itself as art, and the other subordinates the family for a different kind of art. Often they do not even recognize each other as having many of the same characteristics.

With some surprise, then, considering the 53 years that Mr. Markle’s house has been a portion of my psyche, to whatever degree, I found myself turning away from intensifying that involvement. My realization that Jane wasn’t drawn to the place that much had something to do with my decision, although she was willing to make the purchase — but still, I deliberately passed up the opportunity to spend the later years of my life in the main environment I’d known between the ages of 3 and 12. I felt regret and a strong attraction, but in some way realized that Sayre wasn’t the course to follow. Jane agreed, and we made conscious decisions to go elsewhere.