“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

People have written here asking about soul mates.³ In certain circles this is the latest vogue. The idea is an old one; it is based upon the reality of counterparts, and presents another version of the theory. But, again, it is treated with an almost pompous seriousness. (Pause.) Many of those who use the term do it to hide rather than to release their own joyful abilities. They spend time searching for their soul mates — but the search involves them in a pilgrimage for a kind of impossible communication with another, in which all division is lost, with the two then trying to join in a cementing oneness, suffocating all sense of play or creativity. You are not one part, or one half, of another soul,⁴ searching through the annals of time for your partner, undone until you are completed by your soul mate.

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:

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.

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

(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. [...] 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. [...]

[...] I wondered about the countless times counterparts had unwittingly gathered on similar occasions, and what sort of numberless exchanges had taken place on unconscious levels between those who were psychically related in some fashion.