“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There is nothing esoteric about families. They represent the kind of relationships that you take for granted. The same applies to counterparts, except that you are not ordinarily familiar with the term or concept.

Certain members of a family often act out particular roles, however, for the family as a whole. One might be the upstart, another the perfect achiever. Psychologists now often try to deal with the family as a whole, by allowing the different members to see how they may be exaggerating certain tendencies at the expense of others.

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.

You usually live with your physical family, though this does not always apply; sometimes your ancestors come from various countries, so there is a physical lineage that you understand. There are often homecomings, where distant relatives return to the homestead. Now psychically the same applies in terms of counterparts. If you belong to any particular groups, often your closest counterparts will also be there. You will be a counterpart from their viewpoint, by the way. Many political, civic, educational or religious groups are composed of counterparts.

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

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.

(10:30.) Now there are races, physically speaking. There are also psychic counterparts of races — families of consciousness, so to speak — all related, yet having different overall characteristics or specialties.

Most of the people who come to Ruburt’s classes are Sumari,⁷ for example. There are eight other such psychic families — nine in all. Some of Ruburt’s students are counterparts of each other. Many of the people who come here come home in the ways that [members of a physical] family attend a reunion.

(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.

Now any group will show the same kind of interrelationships.* You can see them for yourselves. There is great diversity within the family of consciousness called Sumari, as there is within any physical race, and there is also great variety within other psychic families.

(11:14.) You choose to be born in a particular physical family, however, with your brothers and sisters, or as an only child. So, generally speaking, your counterparts are born in the same psychic family of your contemporaries. These families can be called Gramada —

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.

(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.)

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.