“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane and I consider Seth’s concept of counterparts to be an intriguing psychological framework, spacious enough to serve as a workable thematic structure in which the social and nationalistic characteristics of our species can be studied, as well as the components of the individual psyche. That is, the private person is here seen as interacting with others because there is, beneath our awareness, an inner “person-to-person” relationship connecting each individual with his or her physical counterparts, though they may well be living in other parts of the globe while sharing the same historical period. It follows, then, that one may or may not ever meet a counterpart “in the flesh” — may or may not even suspect the existence of such relationships.

(The material on counterparts emerged from Seth’s treatment of reincarnation. Along with his addition of simultaneous time, I’d say that the concept of counterparts provides reincarnation with a novel approach indeed; and that our awareness of both has always been latent within the reincarnational framework, whether in simultaneous or linear terms.

(Now I’d like to present a batch of notes, ideas, and excerpts from sessions about reincarnation, counterparts, and related data, pulling them together into a coherent picture. Although reincarnation and its variations has been discussed by Seth almost from the very beginning of our sessions, the subject didn’t represent one of our own main concerns. For that matter, Jane almost actively resisted such information in the past. She still says comparatively little about reincarnation on her own, although Seth shows no such reservations.

(Actually, we’ve had two recent indications that Seth was going to initiate something like the counterpart thesis, even though he hadn’t used the term itself. The first clue came in a private, or deleted, session held a week ago on Monday night [November 18, 1974]; the second hint was given in ESP class on the following evening.

(In our private session, Seth commented on my “quite legitimate” reincarnational data involving the black woman, Maumee or Mawmee, who’d lived on the Caribbean island of Jamaica early in the 19th century. He went on to say:) You helped that woman. Your present sense of security and relative detachment gave her strength. She knew she would survive, because she was aware of your knowledge. I will say more about it, but for now that is the end of the session. Ruburt has had enough for a night.

(“Okay. I really want to know all about it. But at some other time.” (After that, we gave up and went to bed. In ESP class the following night, Seth indicated that he was ready to expand his concepts of personality still further — though, again, he didn’t mention counterparts per se. He started by commenting on my experience with Maumee once more. Then he continued.)

(Here I asked Seth if the strong thrilling sensations I’d repeatedly felt at the time had anything to do with my perceptions of the “ghost images” of Maumee and her surroundings. Seth answered:)

(The material in these recent excerpts rather prepared us for Seth’s introduction of counterparts, then, in Session 721. In ESP class the next evening [on November 26], Seth began contending with some of the questions that instantly arose as a result of his new material. I’d just read aloud portions of the 721st session when one longtime student, whom I’ll call Florence, commented that there “has to be a balance between each of us and our counterparts.” Speaking strongly and humorously, Seth immediately took over the discussion.

(Then Seth came through with this aside, as he referred to a guest:) One small note to our astrologer-in-spirit over there. One tiny, wicked hint! Each of you has a birthday that you recognize — one birthdate — but there are hidden variables, because of what I am saying here tonight, that do not apply in those charts because you have not thought of them.

(“Well,” I said to Jane after class, as we discussed the Chinese-American situation cited by Seth, “I don’t know about counterpart relationships in other kinds of realities, but it’s certainly obvious that at least some physical counterparts can hate each other …” So the larger self, I thought, would be quite capable of seeking experience through its parts in every way imaginable. Although it might be difficult for us to understand, let alone accept, the whole self or entity must regard all of its counterparts as sublime facets of itself — no matter whether they loved, suffered,⁵ hated, or killed each other or “outsiders.” Within its great reaches it would transform its counterparts’ actions in ways that were, quite possibly, beyond our emotional and intellectual grasp. At the same time, the self would learn and be changed through the challenges and struggles of its human portions.

(So far we’ve been dealing with the idea of counterparts in our own physical reality. By way of contrast, however, Seth stated last month in the 713th session, after 10:32:) Nothing exists outside the psyche, however, that does not exist within it, and there is no unknown world that does not have its psychological or psychic counterpart. (Before that, from Session 712:) To some extent or another, there are counterparts of all realities within your psyche.

(Continuing to trace such references back through the material, I’d like to direct the reader to several passages from the 683rd session for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality; in them Seth contends with variations on the counterpart theme as they’re developed in certain other probable realities:)

(Seth’s material on counterparts did make us wonder about Jane’s and his earlier uses of the word and its concepts. Checking backward through past sessions and Jane’s poetry, I soon learned that her intuitive grasp of the term had always been truer than mine, for I’d carried the idea that “counterpart” implied a status of opposites rather than the complementary one it really does. Seth also used the term in its correct sense.⁷

(In Chapter 19 of Personal Reality, I found this line of Seth’s in the 667th session for May 30, 1973:) For reason and emotion are natural counterparts.

(Ten sessions earlier, there’s a particularly evocative reference to counterparts in the 657th session for April 18, 1973, in Chapter 15 of Personal Reality. In retrospect that material seems to be a clear indication of the later development of the counterpart concept — and one passage could well refer to “Unknown” Reality long before that project was ever thought of as far as Jane and I were concerned. Seth:)

(Also consider these two still-earlier excerpts from the 520th session for March 20, 1970, in Chapter 3 of Seth Speaks:)

(And what about the very first counterpart references in our sessions? In Chapter 1 of The Seth Material Jane described how we began these sessions [on December 2, 1963] through our use of the Ouija board. During the first three sessions the material came from a Frank Withers — who, it developed in the 4th session, was one of the “personality fragments” making up the Seth entity, or whole self. Just before Seth announced his presence to us in that same session, Frank Withers spelled out a remark through the board that meant little to Jane and me at the time: “One whole entity may need several manifestations, even at simultaneous so-called times.”

(Seth himself first used “counterpart” in the 6th session for December 11, 1963. At the time — and for a long while afterward — his employment of the word meant little, if anything, to Jane and me. The newly begun sessions already contained a number of unfamiliar terms and ideas: In the 4th session three days earlier, for instance, Seth had just given us our entity names [Ruburt for Jane, Joseph for me], and touched upon the psychic links connecting the three of us. Any subtleties afforded by concepts like counterparts would have quite escaped us. For that matter, at the time we didn’t know whether or not the sessions would continue. Nor were we particularly concerned about the issue.

(In the 6th session, however, I made quite an intuitive remark: I told Jane I had the notion that Ruburt had once been Joseph. It took me a while to recognize that this had simply been my way of groping toward the realization that Seth, Jane, and I did have a strong psychic relationship. Though we’d started these sessions with the Ouija board, Jane had made such a rapid progression that she was already giving some material vocally. However, at the time we still used the board to obtain answers to most of our questions. After I made my statement about Ruburt and Joseph, Seth spelled out his reply through the board’s pointer as it moved quickly beneath our fingertips:)

Part of same entity or counterpart.

(And so 11 years were to pass before Seth began his outright discussion of his very provocative concept of counterparts.)

I could list a few other past lives I’m supposed to have known, and so could Jane. Some of those we’ve picked up on our own. Over the years Seth has also come through with a modest number of reincarnational experiences involving the three of us, as well as others concerning any two of us. Examples are given in Appendix 18. But Jane and I are more intrigued by passages in Appendix 18 like this one, from the 398th session for March 11, 1964: “Personalities are not static things. Entities are eternal. They are not as nicely nor as neatly packaged out, one to a body, as your psychologists believe.”

A published relationship in which Seth, Jane, and I took part, one that’s innocent of counterpart overtones as far as our material indicates, happened in Denmark in the 1600’s. In Seth Speaks, see Session 541 for Chapter 11.

2. I’ve directed the reader to them before — but in Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality see Jane’s information on neurological speeds in appendixes 4 and 5. As I wrote in Note 19 for Appendix 12: “My personal opinion is that although many may find it difficult reading, Appendix 4 contains some of the most important material in Volume 1.” Jane also referred to her ghostly “Saratoga experience” in that appendix: Both she and Seth dealt with it in sessions 685–86.

3. In the opening notes for the 718th session, I wrote that I’d just finished a series of diagrams for Jane’s Adventures. In Diagram 1 for Chapter 10, I tried to show schematically the same idea Seth mentions here, but with the terminology Jane used in her own book. She wrote about a series of Aspect selves orbiting a nonphysical source self, then continued: “Imagine a multidimensional Ferris wheel, each separated section being an Aspect self. As our ‘seat’ approaches the ground level, we’re the Aspect who intersects with the space-time continuum, and life starts. But this Ferris wheel moves in every possible direction, and its spokes are ever-moving waves of energy, connecting the Aspects with the center source. Each other position intersects with a different kind of reality in which it is, in turn, immersed.”

4. Seth never did tell Florence any more about her other counterparts, though. Nor did she ask him to; she worked with the information he’d already given her, plus whatever she could divine for herself.

5. I thought of Seth’s material on pain and suffering, as presented in Appendix 12. See the excerpts from the 580th session for Seth Speaks, and the 634th session for Personal Reality.

6. Perhaps I should have briefly discussed it in Volume 1, but ever since Seth originally gave his “Joe, Jane, Jim, and Bob” material (as I call it) in the 683rd session, I’ve wondered about possible connections between the probabilities described in that session and our own reality: How much of our species’ distorted, intuitive knowledge of those probable realities may appear as myth and oddity in our camouflage universe? I’m thinking about androgyny, of course, which is the concept of both male and female in one, and/or of hermaphroditism, wherein a person or animal possesses the sexual organs of both the male and the female. Considering our personal lack of conscious knowledge about androgyny and such related concepts at the time, Jane and I think it most interesting that Seth came through with that particular material in the 683rd session.

8. A longer version of this material from the 657th session is presented in Note 3 for Session 683, in Volume 1; I wanted to tell readers a little about counterparts then — not only to get them interested in Volume 2 before it was published, but to show the direction in which Seth’s material was headed.

That same 657th session contains Seth’s extremely useful statement: “The Present Is the Point of Power.” From it he proceeds to show how all that we are — whatever our individual belief systems may be — stems from the brilliant focus of our physical, mental, and spiritual abilities in “present” experience.