“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.

Because that house is on a hill it has certain advantages. Looking down at the town gives the kind of perspective that each of you enjoys — as here (in the apartment house) you look down from the second story.

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.

There are alliances and understandings in neighborhoods — signs for others to read. The front entrance of the Foster Avenue house was not even used. The hill house is set up high. Anyone who walks up the steps from the street knows [he or she is] making a trip. Your daily environment is very important to your work, and to Ruburt. You require certain things of your art, and therefore you want the same things in your surroundings. Once you had it where you live now, for all of your criticism. Now it is gone, and you are different.

(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.

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 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 … The hill house represents the future, and the contemporary qualities of it. I suggest — and only suggest — that that be your choice, because it is the most daring of the ventures for you, and because the hill will give you a view in many more ways than one.

(“You’re talking about the hill house.”)

(“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.]

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.