“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.) You are involved with some of your counterparts more or less directly, while others live in different lands, and are sometimes separated also in terms of age differences or culture — qualities with which you would find it difficult to relate.⁵ Intuitively, you know who the counterparts are in your daily experience. This does not mean that if you become consciously aware of such affiliations you must then feel it your responsibility to form a kind of culture of counterparts, or to try and affect other people’s lives by reminding them of your relationship. You are each individual. Some of the people you dislike most heartily may be counterparts.⁶ Each of you may be exploring different aspects of the same overall challenge.

(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.

(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.

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.

(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.)

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.

“An idea came to me a few days ago, when I was thinking about my fascination with the time of Henry VIII (in 16th-century England). I wondered, ‘Whatever happened to Henry?’ Suddenly I had the thought that maybe in linear terms Henry is now ‘many’ people — that he has a number of offshoots or counterpart personalities alive at once. So, theoretically, you could get all the Henry people together now, have them alter their consciousnesses to a certain degree, and compile from them an amazing multilevel, multifaceted portrait of Henry VIII — assuming, of course, that one would be willing to accept such subjective experiences as valid. What a wonderful, weird view of ‘history’ — and probably a truer one than we’re used to….”

“Those memories exist as patterns. In this life, each of you come together and part, come together and part again, forming a counterpart relationship when it suits your purposes, as streams of consciousness mix and merge, and then separate.

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.