“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.

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.

Give us a moment … The Sumari are naturally playful — inventors, and relatively unfettered. They are impatient, however.¹⁰ They will be found in the arts and in the less conventional sciences.

(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.

The Sumari are rambunctious, in certain terms anti-authority, full of energy. They are usually individualists, against systems of any kind. They are not “born reformers,” however. They do not insist that everyone believe in their ideas, but they are stubborn in that they insist upon the right to believe in their own ideas, and will avoid all coercion.

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 —

(‘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.)

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.)

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.

“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.

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.