“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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

(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….”

(“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.

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.)