“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Let’s take another look at that house up here on the hill,” I said and our car began the long steady climb toward a certain dead-end road … So we looked at the hill house again — if from the outside only — but this time we really looked at it. Our inner cogitations about it were beginning to flower. Mine came into consciousness before Jane’s did, but she soon caught up with me. [See the notes prefacing the 736th session.]

(Seth had used more than half of Monday’s session to discuss our house hunting in connection with Sayre and Foster Avenue. Some of his related material there had been fairly personal, but we’d left it in place because of its general application. When Seth added the hill house to his list tonight, however, his connecting information about Jane and me was so intimate that we decided to delete parts of it. But I’ve reassembled the remainder in the proper order, and it’s more than enough to show how closely such “objective” things as houses can be bound up with beliefs and emotions.

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.

(10:15.) Give us a moment … I am trying to give you the best information I can. The hill house has its own kind of inner light. This is not possessed by the Sayre house, and I recommend against that house regardless of price. It has a built-in darkness that no amount of applied light would disperse. Nor will either of you ever — particularly you, Joseph — be satisfied with sharing a driveway.¹ The hill house, because of its location, adds a spaciousness that is inside the Foster Avenue house; but either way, you have an open feeling in terms of expansion.

Now: Once I gave you a recommendation, and you did not really take it.² I can foresee probabilities, but you make your own reality, and I will not take the responsibility. Taking that for granted, and knowing your characteristics, I have more to say. You may not like it.

(“I’m shocked,” she countered. “For a while I loved the idea of that place. But he’s so fucking smart — Seth —”

(“Oh, hell, I’m getting more,” Jane laughed, coming back into the living room. She sat down. “I’ll have to say that when I ask for straight stuff, I get it.” She still looked a bit teary, but at the same time I was sure now that we’d steered away from any probable reality involving Foster Avenue — and perhaps Sayre too, I thought, considering Seth’s material at 10:15 tonight.³

Now: The hill environment is as important to your painting as the ready-made workroom in the Foster Avenue house. The very air is inspiring, so that you will paint more there even if your work area is not immediately as good. The sunny nature [of that house], regardless of what Ruburt thinks now, will help him creatively and physically — but the hill house represents a decision to face the world while maintaining certain necessary and quite reasonable conditions. It provides privacy yet openness. The hillside is not yours, yet it is your view, and it has strong evocative connections with your creative lives. A definite change in living patterns and of psychic attitude will result, that would not happen in the house on Foster Avenue.

This also means that greater adaptability is required, but it will be to the good. The whole difference here is the quality of nature as it surrounds both places. The one invites you to roam, the other to stay inside. Both houses have Sumari characteristics, but in different combinations. You both need the sun.

(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.

3. The day after this (738th) session was held I wrote to the real estate agents in Sayre, the Johnsons, informing them that Jane and I were withdrawing any interest we had in the Markle house. We sent the notice not only because of Seth’s material in the session, but because we felt that on our own we’d intuitively resolved a certain probable course of action — just as we’d done concerning the house on Foster Avenue in Elmira. (See Note 8 for Session 737.)

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.