“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.

Now first the house.

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.

Houses themselves have a quality, a life, that is picked up by potential buyers. Certain houses repel you and Ruburt. They will positively attract others, however, so the qualities in the houses that appeal to you two are precisely the ones that have turned off others, and prevented their sale.

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.

At this time of your lives it is important that you act. I am telling you that of the [Elmira] houses in your mind it really makes little difference which one you choose. Neither is perfect. You would find yourselves quite hampered in [any] idealistically perfect environment. You need some give-and-take. Either place could well be made to suit your specific needs, and each reflects strong elements of your personalities.

(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 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 … 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.

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.

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

(10:45. “I feel sad,” Jane said as soon as she was out of a very good trance. “I feel funny — like some part of me wants to burrow into that house on Foster Avenue. Walk around that yard all alone at night….”

(“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.

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.

(11:41. That was that on the families of consciousness for the evening. Jane proceeded to deliver for Seth a few more paragraphs of house material, here deleted, followed by this exchange.)

2. Once again, see the notes at the 11:43 break for the 737th session — this time about the “1964 house.”

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.