“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Some wanted me to identity their counterparts for them. One student (Fred), a contractor, said little. Instead, during the last week he let his own creative imagination go wherever it might while he held the general idea in his mind. He played with the concept, then. In a way his experiences were like those of a child — open, curious, filled with enthusiasm. As a result he himself discovered a few of his counterparts.²

Most people, however, are so utterly serious that they suspect their own creativity. They expect that its products will be unreal or not valid in the physical world. Yet there is a great correlation between what you think of as creativity, altered states of consciousness, play, and “spiritual” development.

When you create a poem or a song or a painting you are in a state of play, of enjoyment, of freedom. You intend to make something different, to produce a new version of reality. You create out of love, for the sake of the experience. At one time or another almost everyone has that kind of experience, but children have it often. They compose songs and music and paintings in their heads. They alter the focus of their consciousnesses frequently. They do not stop to ask whether or not the play is real or pertinent. Physically, play develops their body mechanisms. It also flexes the great capabilities of their minds.

(Pause.) When you think, colon: “Life is earnest,” and decide to put away childish things, then often you lose sight of your own creativity and become so deadly serious that you cannot play, even mentally. Spiritual development becomes a goal that must be attained. The goal is to be achieved through hard work, and as long as you believe this you do not understand what the spirit is.

I keep returning to natural analogies — but plants do not work at developing their potential. They are not beautiful because they believe it is their responsibility to please your eye. They are beautiful because they love themselves and beauty. When you are so serious, you almost always distort the nature of your own spirit as far as your understanding of it is concerned. You cannot let your guard down long enough to discover what it is. You keep looking for new rules or regulations, or methods of discipline.

In their own ways children are quite aware of their counterparts, and of other portions of their individual realities. They relate to their counterparts in dreams. They sometimes see them as “invisible” companions. You dream of your own counterparts frequently, but you are so afraid of maintaining what you think of as the rational adult self that you ignore such communications.

People have written here asking about soul mates.³ In certain circles this is the latest vogue. The idea is an old one; it is based upon the reality of counterparts, and presents another version of the theory. But, again, it is treated with an almost pompous seriousness. (Pause.) Many of those who use the term do it to hide rather than to release their own joyful abilities. They spend time searching for their soul mates — but the search involves them in a pilgrimage for a kind of impossible communication with another, in which all division is lost, with the two then trying to join in a cementing oneness, suffocating all sense of play or creativity. You are not one part, or one half, of another soul,⁴ searching through the annals of time for your partner, undone until you are completed by your soul mate.

(A one-minute pause, eyes closed, at 9:42.) When you become too intent to maintain your reality you lose it, for you deny the creativity upon which it rests.

You pay little heed, however. You think that this is just your “imagination.” The unknown reality is alive in your own psyche. There are hints of it in all of your experience. You would not be alive, in your terms, if first you did not imagine yourself as you are. Play is, in fact, one of the most practical methods of survival, both individually and for the species. Within its framework lie the secrets of creativity, and within the secrets of creativity lie the secrets of being.

The life that you consider real represents one narrow stratum of even your physical experience. I am not speaking here of other realities that could add to that dimension. (Pause.) Play brings you a needed rest from your distorted concepts of selfhood, and many of the world’s finest inventions have come when the inventor was not concentrating upon work, but indulging in pastimes or play.

The upstart, for instance, may be displaying all of the bold aspects inhibited by other family members. Through this person the others may vicariously share the excitement or suspense of those experiences that are otherwise blocked. On the other hand the achiever may be completely hiding such impulses, while expressing faithfully the desires of other family members for “excellence” and discipline. Now the same can apply to counterparts, and those in your experience can show to you, in exaggerated form, comma, abilities of your own upon which you have not chosen to concentrate. You can learn much from your counterparts, therefore, and they from you. Those counterparts that you meet will be working, playing, and being more or less within your own culture. This does not mean that you are bits and pieces of some hypothetical whole self.

These counterparts form psychic families. They are family representations on another level. First of all, such groups have a built-in focus — political, civic, religious, sexual, or whatever. (Pause.) Certain members of the group express the repressed tendencies of others. Yet each is supported through a common sense of belonging, so that the group sometimes seems to have its own overall identity, in which each member plays a part. Any reader can easily discover this by examining the groups to which he or she belongs.

The unknown reality. You have inner affiliations. What are they? I will outline the inner psychic species, and it is up to you to discover to which one you belong.

The Sumari are rambunctious, in certain terms anti-authority, full of energy. They are usually individualists, against systems of any kind. They are not “born reformers,” however. They do not insist that everyone believe in their ideas, but they are stubborn in that they insist upon the right to believe in their own ideas, and will avoid all coercion.

(Pause.) Earl (Williams) and Sam (Garret) are counterparts. To my readers these names mean nothing. Yet in each case the relationships noted indicate inner realizations and connections. The same realities appear in each of your lives. Will Petrosky and Ben (Fein) are counterparts. Will (who, incidentally, witnessed the 729th session) is a very intellectual young man — proud of it, though he goes to great effort to show he is one of the boys. On the other hand, Ben Fein trusts his intuitions fully, and relies upon them, yet to some extent fears his own great energy. In many respects he is a child, and utterly spontaneous.

(‘Wait,” I asked, “do you want to spell those?” Jane, as Seth, nodded. Then rapidly, almost with a lilt, as though singing, she spelled out eight names. I added Sumari to the list. Where necessary I’ve also indicated syllabification and accentuation, following Seth’s own delivery.)

Now these categories do not come first. Your individuality comes first. You have certain characteristics of your own. These place you in a certain position. As you are not a rock or a mineral, but a person, so your individuality places you in a particular family or species of consciousness. This represents your overall viewpoint of reality.

You like to be an initiator or a follower or a nourisher. You like to create variations on old systems, or you like to create new ones. You like to deal primarily with healing, or with information, or with physical data. You like to deal with sight, or sound, with dreams, or with translating inner data into the working psychic material of your society. So you choose a certain focus, as you choose ahead of time your physical family.¹¹

1. It will be remembered that Seth first mentioned his concept of counterparts in the ESP class session for Tuesday evening, November 18, 1974, rather than in dictation for “Unknown” Reality; see the opening notes for Session 721. In those notes I also referred to the experiences of my Roman and Jamaican counterparts — episodes that, I wrote, “played some considerable part in establishing a foundation, or impetus for such a development” (as the counterpart one). Then see all of Seth’s material on counterparts in the 721st session itself.

4. See Seth’s very acute discussions of the soul (or entity) in sessions 526–28 for Chapter 6 of Seth Speaks. He came through with many excellent points. I’ve always been intrigued by the remark he made just before 10:43 in the 526th session: “You are one manifestation of your own soul.” Then in Chapter 9 of Personal Reality, see the 637th session at 10:20: “A group of cells forms an organ. A group of selves forms a soul. I am not telling you that you do not have a soul to call your own. You are a part of your soul. It belongs to you, and you to it.”

To me, beside whatever relationship it might have with counterpart reality, the soul-mate belief embodies strongly distorted versions of the ideas contained in the two Seth passages quoted above.

7. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, see the Sumari material and references in Appendix 9, and notes 2 and 3. In Volume 2, Seth discussed the Sumari language at 11:18 in the 723rd session; also see notes 9 and 11.

Before I got around to asking Seth about whether or not Peter Smith and I were counterparts, Sue had enough time to do some thinking of her own about the subject. As she’s done before (in Volume 1, see the opening notes for Session 692, with Note 2), Sue produced some excellent writing on matters psychic — this time on possible variations within the counterpart relationship. Here are abbreviated excerpts covering a few of the ideas she wrote down at my request:

And in his own way Seth confirmed one of Sue’s projections. From a deleted session that I prefer not to date here because of other, personal reasons: “I may have slipped up, but I do not think so: I do not believe I gave the information about you and Peter in book dictation (for ‘Unknown’ Reality), in order to keep the material simple enough for the reader — although you chose to include that (724th) session in the book anyhow. But you and Peter are and are not counterparts. You do share psychic memories, and hold in common the memories of other selves who did live in the time of your (fourth) Roman-soldier incident.

10. Jane initiated the Sumari development on her own, in the ESP class for November 23, 1971. The next night Seth began discussing that psychic event in the 598th session. During one delivery he remarked somewhat humorously that the Sumari “want someone else to take care of what they have created …”, that “they don’t hang around to cut the grass….” Jane quoted short passages from the session in Chapter 7 of Adventures in Consciousness.