“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(“And conventional families?” I asked Seth. I thought many readers would come up with that question at the same time I did.)

(10:45. With one exception — that of Sue Watkins — all the names given by Seth, involving counterpart relationships, have been changed. Most of the people are members of Jane’s class; some have met certain of their counterparts, but not others; Jane, Sue, and I are the only ones who know everyone Seth named. During break Jane came through with additional psychic affiliations among her students, but it isn’t necessary to discuss them here. She couldn’t say whether Seth would indicate any more counterparts after break.

(I told her I’d been rather surprised when Seth had so baldly stated that there were only nine families of [human] consciousness upon our planet. The number seemed too small, too arbitrary. I also remarked upon my understanding that usually neither she nor Seth liked to categorize new information so definitely. Jane, while agreeing, couldn’t elaborate upon this very much, beyond saying that she felt each family could have subdivisions, and/or combine with others, so that mathematically at least there existed the possibility of “a lot” of them. I liked that idea much better. Strangely, neither of us had ever asked Seth to name any of the other families of consciousness, following Jane’s Sumari breakthrough some three years ago — but at the end of this session see the material about the family of consciousness Sue Watkins had tuned in to back then.

(‘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.)

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

(“Thank you, Seth, and the same to you.”

(I wondered if the attributes or vocations Seth had recited could be directly related to the families of consciousness he’d given just previously, and Jane said this was the case. Neither of us could tell what went with what, though; perhaps we’ll get information that will help us make some connections; perhaps I can present a list of such correlations in a note.

(Then Jane remembered that our friend Sue Watkins had had something to do with Seth naming a second family of consciousness shortly after Jane had brought the Sumari concept through several years ago [see Note 10]. But the thing was, Jane mused now, that she didn’t think “Sue’s family” was on the list Seth had just given: “It was something like Gramada, but that wasn’t it….” I made a note to check with Sue, whom we don’t see in every class anymore, since at this time she’s living outside of Elmira; I also want to see what I can find in the sessions, so that we can ask Seth to clear up any discrepancy.

(While we were having a snack Jane “picked up,” presumably from Seth, that the psychic families were “like your overall mood, the predominant one you carry through your lifetime….” Then she had an interesting comment as we made ready for bed; it pertained to the question I’d asked Seth about counterparts in families: “I think that maybe the family unit is designed more to take care of the reincarnational framework, instead of dealing so much with counterparts.” I wondered how all of this fit in with probabilities, but by then we were getting too sleepy to figure anything out.

(Finally, and perhaps prematurely: Left untapped so far in all of this is any material from Seth on whether the counterpart and family-of-consciousness mechanisms apply to other species. If they do, I remarked to Jane as I typed this session the next day, then Seth must have a great amount of extremely interesting information on those concepts in relation to animals, say, or birds, insects, and marine life — not to mention bacteria and viruses; perhaps, also, submicroscopic entities down to the molecular and atomic levels, or even “below,” are involved. I added that I hoped we’d soon begin to get the material we wanted on all of those categories, and others, and that Seth’s flow of information on such topics would continue as the years passed. I planned to remind him often of our desires here.)

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.

3. Our dictionary defines a soul mate as one of the opposite sex with whom an individual “has a deeply personal relationship” — a mundane enough description. Jane and I had thought the term, along with its implications, rather out of style until the publication of The Seth Material in 1970. Then we began to get letters from readers who either asked for Seth’s help in finding soul mates, or for his verification that such counterparts had, indeed, already been located.

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.”

That material bothered Jane, as I wrote at the end of the session, since “she wasn’t taken with the idea of a group soul, say, or of sharing a soul.” For Seth’s resolution of this little dilemma, see Session 638 in the same chapter.

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.

5. Seth has already referred to counterpart relationships at the extremes of distance, and, to a lesser extent, in terms of age and cultural differences. Jane and I can represent the direct involvement of counterparts; see the 726th session after 11:40. Then see Seth’s material in Appendix 21 on the counterpart association that Florence, a student in ESP class, has with a young man in China. I’m almost 10 years older than Jane; Florence is probably 25 years older than her Chinese counterpart.

6. Seth’s line about the dislike that can exist among counterparts is hilarious, nor am I being facetious in so commenting. To use the members of ESP class as a general example, Jane and I have often noted the variety of feelings, ranging from the most positive to the most negative, that her students exhibit toward one another. The interesting thing about Seth’s statement is that with counterpart theory in mind one can gain a fresh appreciation of how underlying emotions and motives flow among certain individuals, sometimes surfacing in feelings of dislike, for instance, to whatever degree. And, of course, my thinking here is in line with material Seth himself soon gives in this session.

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.

Originally, however, I felt a surge of uneasiness as soon as Seth mentioned that my friend, artist Peter Smith, is a counterpart of mine. When I checked the 724th session, I affirmed the reason for that reaction: Seth had stated therein that Peter and I were not counterparts, although “closely enough allied so that in certain terms you ‘share’ some of the same psychic memories….” Why the contradiction, I wondered, even if Seth had qualified it? Neither Jane nor I believed I’d mistakenly recorded Seth in either the 724th or the 732nd session; we planned to ask him soon for clarification.

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:

“The thought occurred to me that perhaps Seth’s remarks (in sessions 724 and 732) were more pertinent to the situation than we imagined. What if at one time Peter and Rob had been counterparts, and, having served a purpose, somehow ‘became’ no longer counterparts? Once you ‘killed your enemy,’ (and therefore yourself) — like the Roman soldier in Jerusalem — and realized it, did something change the counterpart connection? Do counterparts slide in and out of interconnections, according to needs, beliefs, and the experience of the present personalities involved?

“As Seth has noted before — and as we feel, I think — there are distinct connections between Peter and me and Rob and Jane, in terms of age differences, creative abilities, belief patterns, et cetera. Not that I think the four of us are involved in a counterpart association now — just that perhaps we have been, or that our friendship is a recalling of that kind of connection. Or that we recognize certain possibilities in each other and react (rather humorously, I think) to those.

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.

9. Carl Jones is mentioned in the 561st session for Chapter 14 of Seth Speaks.

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.

In Seth Speaks, see chapters 11–13. Seth delivered much material about reincarnation, including “the time of choosing” between lives, recreating and changing events in past lives, and past and present reincarnational family relationships; probabilities; dreams; the fetus, and so forth.