“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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 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.

(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.

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.

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.