“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I began this short appendix a couple of weeks after the 732nd session was held, but didn’t finish certain parts of it until some time later. Seth’s naming a good number of class members as counterparts came as no great surprise to Jane and me — but it did make us more than a little suspicious at first. We’ve been thinking about counterpart ideas since Seth introduced the concept two months ago; see the opening notes for the 721st session. Then, in the 726th session, Seth named Jane and me as counterparts of each other. Although we keep the power of suggestion in mind, on one level we found Seth’s associations quite pleasant for the most part, and, once given, somewhat as we might have expected them to be. Yet I felt no strong surge of emotion, for instance, to learn that Norma Pryor [whom I’ve met but a few times], Peter Smith, and Jack Pierce are counterparts of mine — nor did they when I read Seth’s material to them during ESP class six nights later. Jane’s feelings were pretty similar to mine, when Seth named three students as her counterparts: Sue Watkins, Zelda, and “the young man from Maryland….”

(Our suspicions entered in, however, when Jane and I realized that between us [and including each other] we were personally acquainted with nine counterparts: All but one of them [Alan Koch] were class members. As Jane wrote:

(My counterpart, Peter Smith, and I are both professional artists; we’re roughly of an age, with strong interests in other forms of creativity, such as writing, and in myth and fantasy.¹ A number of the similarities and differences between Jane and me should be obvious to our readers; she also does quite a lot of painting. Both of my other class counterparts, Norma Pryor and Jack Pierce, are themselves of a younger generation than Jane, Peter, and I. Jack writes novels, as yet unpublished. Norma does not. Both are very quiet and unassuming.

[...] 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. [...]

(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….” [...]

[...] 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. [...] 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.