“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.]

(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.

(These notes give me a chance to hint at another in the series of “house connections” that Jane and I have become so much aware of this month — for there is a close professional relationship between the owner of the Foster Avenue house and the real estate agency through which we’re buying the house on the hill. Jane and I had heard of this association in a remote way, but it had no meaning for us until we committed ourselves to the hill house; the agency concerned is but one of many we’d contacted; yet also involved is our friend Debbie, who works for another real estate firm, and who had first called our attention to the hill house. [...]

Ruburt was correct: The picture of you, taken on the hill in the front yard (by a friend), portrays you as far as your stance toward the hill house and land is concerned. [...]

1. I want to note here that at the same time Jane and I decided to buy the hill house, we learned that the house next door, to the west, would soon be for sale; because of a job transfer its owner would be moving with his family to California this summer. [...] Although Jane and I liked the place well enough, we had no doubt that the hill house was the one for us.

[...] 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. (And this when we haven’t been inside of hill house. [...]

The Foster house represents many things, and though it is not on a hill it represents your feelings of secrecy and privacy. [...] You can hide in it better than you can in the hill house.

Because that house is on a hill it has certain advantages. [...]

(The building, a restaurant or whatever, at the foot of the hill was fairly American, she said, compared to the large white building at the top of the curving road and hill. [...]

[...] This statue, with the row houses to the left and the street light: Following around the curve to the left, you run into a better-sectioned area, up a hill on a broad street now. [...]

To the right just before this last left-hand turn and hill, is a fairly low building where I believe our friends eat, or at least they visit here. [...]

(The house that was for sale — and which we came to call the “hill house” — was empty and locked. [...] The house faced the south; before it in the valley lay Elmira itself; almost hidden by trees; beyond the city the hills rose in tiers. Streets — without sidewalks — passed the hill house on but two sides, at the southwest corner, and each one dead-ended less than a block away. In back of the house to the north and east, woods rolled up the gentle curve of the hill and over its top.

(Now Jane’s and my psyches were involved in this other-than-conscious activity concerning the hill house for 16 days from the time we first saw it. [...] Jane and I were free to make our own joint decision — and all the while, both of us were unconsciously processing the hill-house situation.

(One of the first houses Jane and I looked at yesterday occupied a hill side corner lot in West Elmira, on a street we’d never been on before. [...]

[...] This statue, with the row houses to the left and the street light: Following around the curve to the left you run into a better sectioned area, up a hill on a broad street now, then the street curves again to the left, and beneath it are rocks, that is, a rocky ledge down to the sea, I believe. To the right just before this last left hand turn and hill is a fairly low building where I believe our friends eat, or at least they visit here.

(“We did stop at a church on a hill with a cross on top of the church.”)

Further on, at the top of the hill, at the left hand turn, is another white building at the curve, that is a new building. [...]

[...] Jane spontaneously gave voice to her song yesterday afternoon while sitting in the glass-enclosed front porch of our hill house. [...]

While you were
sleeping,
all the cupboards
of the earth
were filled.
Mother Earth
sought out each
need.

While you were
weeping,
your tears fell
as sweet rain
drops on small
parched hills
that rise in worlds
you cannot see,
though you are known
there.

While you were
sleeping,
Mother Earth
filled all the
cupboards of your
flesh
to overflowing.
Not one atom went
uncomforted
in worlds that
are yours,
but beyond your
knowing.

13. During the 10:36 break for Session 740, which was held a couple of months ago, I wrote that the list of house connections associated with our move to the hill house had grown to over 40 items, “and continues to grow.” [...] It’s neither the most inconsequential item on our list, or the most spectacular — but recently we learned through a close relative of the Steffans (I’ll call them), the couple from whom we bought the hill house, that at a small social gathering over two years ago Jane had spontaneously given something of a psychic “reading” for Mrs. Steffans. [...]

[...] (I wasn’t involved in the little scenario.) The Steffanses moved out of Elmira some months before we purchased the hill house through a real estate agency.

[...] We didn’t know this place [the hill house] even existed then. [...]

[...] Dr. Colucci lives on top of a long steep hill, yet this was the first time in three years, he said, that he had been unable to drive home. Jane said Seth gave this bit of test data because we ourselves had had trouble making a nearby steep hill in our own car, also this month. [...]

[...] Dr. Colucci, as stated, lives atop a hill climbed by a long narrow road. [...]

[...] The other car did refer to the dentist’s difficulty in making the hill, as he told you at your visit. [...]

On February 28, 1968—I sent Dreams to McGraw Hill.

The odds against such a “coincidence” developing would be astronomical — except that the Millers had lived in a neighborhood close to the hill house several years ago (when the acquaintanceship with Louise Akins had been made), had moved out of state, then returned to buy the house next door to us. The house connection is still unique, however, considering that in the hill house Jane and I found ourselves bracketed east and west by people who knew one of her early students — who had in turn mentioned Jane to them. [...]

(In ESP class last night Jane told all of her loyal students, some of whom have been with her almost from the time she began holding such meetings in the summer of 1967, that class was suspended until we’d moved into the hill house and settled down a bit — however long that might take.

(Jane and I were inside “our” hill house for only the second time this afternoon. [...]

[...] I concluded somewhat wryly that if such things developed we’d probably end up running for shelter—hiding in a cave in the hills somewhere....)

(A note by R.F.B.: Jane had formally ended her ESP classes by March 1975, when we moved from our downtown apartments in Elmira, New York, to the hill house at the edge of the city. [...]

[...] A note: This is the third anniversary of our moving into the hill house.

[...] Except for the few listed below, then, it may be sufficient to just state that we’ve been in our hill house for a month, and that after much hard physical labor² we’ve settled down enough to resume our natural rhythms of painting, sessions, books, and play. [...]

[...] From her own viewpoint Jane has already produced for Psychic Politics some very perceptive material on our move to the hill house: “So we made our own special place in more ordinary terms, by symbolizing that particular house and corner, marking it ours, stamping it with the imprint of living symbols which we transposed upon it. [...]

(As if to celebrate our way of life and work in the house on the hill, we were visited last Saturday by Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor at Prentice-Hall, and a publishing colleague of his. [...]

(After lunch today Jane and I were visited by our old friend David Yoder, who’s been in Florida recuperating from the heart bypass surgery he underwent early this year.¹ David brought news that was at first startling, then quickly developed into several conflicting emotions and ideas for us: He’d just learned from a relative of hers that a few weeks ago Mrs. Steffans [not her real name], the wife of the couple we’d purchased the hill house from in March 1975, had committed suicide at her home in a Western state while her husband was away on a business trip.

[...] We actually bought the hill house through the real-estate agent for the Steffanses, a few months after they’d moved out of Elmira. [...]

Her relative, David told us now, had informed him that Mrs. Steffans had suffered bouts of deep depression while living in the hill house. [...]

(Next, Jane said she was trying to find a radio and recorder here at our hill house in Elmira so that Sue Watkins, who lives an hour’s drive to the north, could borrow it. [...] In this chassis Jane and Sue were going up and down and around beautiful, jewel-like green hills. [...]

[...] The house had, we had been told, about an acre of land, although it was all on the steep side of a hill. [...] On one side the hill dropped down to the highway; on the other side it rose at a steep slant. [...]

The hill is a friendly and not threatening one, and in other seasons the setting is more open than it is now. [...]

(There are two other houses on the hill, both quite far from ours; one is above it a good distance, the other beyond it.)

[...] In the dream he flew through this flap literally into another dimension, where the point of the flap was a hill upon which he landed. From that second perspective, the pockets of the jacket in the first perspective became the windows of a building that existed in a still-further, third dimension beyond the hill. Standing on the hill, he knew that in Perspective One the windows of the building in Perspective Three were jacket pockets, but he could no longer perceive them as such. Looking out from the hill in Perspective Two, Perspective One was invisibly behind him, and Perspective Three was still “ahead” of him, separated from him by a gulf he did not understand.

When he approached the hill in Perspective Two, he spoke to the contractor who was there before him. [...]

(On Friday, July 18, Bill Gallagher tells us he had a cluster of fairly close near-accident situations since Monday—one involving two boys on bicycles—he stopped about 20 yards from them—but he was going 55 at the foot of Mount Zoar Hill on Holden Road.