“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For example, you are not creatively playful because you are Sumari. Instead, you join the Sumari grouping because you are creatively playful. The groups of consciousness, then, are not to be equated with, say, astrological houses.

Taking the Sumari as an example, there can be overly intent, ponderous, or simply dour Sumari who have not learned to use their creativity graciously, or with joy. Yet that joyful use of ability will be their intent. At particular periods of history, in your terms, different families may predominate.

The psychic groups, however, overlap physical and national ones. The Sumari are extremely independent, for instance, and as a rule you will not find them born into countries with dictatorships. When they do so appear, their work may set a spark that brings about changes, but they seldom take joint political action. Their creativity is very threatening to such a society.

However, the Sumari are practical in that they bring creative visions into physical reality, and try to live their lives accordingly. They are initiators, yet they make little attempt to preserve organizations, even ones they feel to be fairly beneficial. They are not lawbreakers by design or intent. They are not reformers in the strictest sense, yet their playful work does often end up reforming a society or culture. They are given to art, but in its broadest sense also, trying to make an “art” of living, for example. They have been a part of most civilizations, though they appeared in the Middle Ages (A.D. 476–c. A.D. 1450) least of all. They often come to full strength before great social changes. Others might build social structures from their work, for example, but the Sumari themselves, while pleased, will usually not be able to feel any intuitive sense of belonging with any structured group.²

There is no correlation between the families of consciousness and bodily characteristics, however. Many of the Sumari choose to be born in the springtime,³ but all those born in the spring are not Sumari, and no general rule applies there. They also have a liking for certain races, but again no specific rules apply. Many of the Irish, the Jews, the Spanish, and some lesser numbers of the French, for instance, are Sumari — though they appear in all races.

Generally speaking, America has not been a Sumari nation, nor have the Scandinavian countries or England. Psychically speaking, the Sumari often very nicely arrange existences in which they are a minority — in a democracy, say, so that they can work at their art within a fairly stable political situation. They are not interested in government, yet they do rely upon it to that extent. They are apt to be self-reliant within that framework. Their recognized artistic abilities may predominate or be fairly minimal.

Sumari is a state of mind, a slant of being. They are not fighters, nor will they generally advocate a violent overthrow of government or mores. They believe in the creativity of change, naturally occurring.

Nevertheless, they are often part of the cultural underground simply because they are seldom conformers. A Sumari is very uncomfortable as a member of any large commercial venture, particularly if the work involves habitual or boring routine. They are not happy on assembly lines. They like to play with details — or to use them for creative purposes. They often go from one job or profession to another for that reason.

(9:55.) If you begin to look into the nature of yourself, and feel intuitively that you are a Sumari, then you should look for a position in which you can use your inventiveness. Sumari enjoy theoretical mathematics, for example, yet make miserable bookkeepers.

In the arts, Picasso was a Sumari.

(9:57.) Give us a moment … Many entertainers are Sumari. You will seldom find them in politics. They are not usually historians.

(Long pause.) There are few with any position within organized religions. Because of their feelings of self-reliance, however, you can find them as farmers, working intuitively with the land. They are equally divided between the sexes. In your society, however, Sumari qualities in the male have until lately been frowned upon to some degree.

2. Jane and I are Sumari (see notes 7 and 10 for Session 732). I can write that many of the characteristics Seth mentioned this evening apply to us, as we’ve learned over the years — especially those concerning our love of art, our being initiators, and our desires to be free of social structures. At the same time we readily agree that organizations are indispensable within the world’s very complicated cultures. We do have strong interests in national and world politics. Yet if our work is to ever result in social changes of any kind, those changes will have to be carried through by others, for primarily Jane and I work alone.

In a way, however, Seth may do Jane and me something of an injustice when he remarks, for instance, that the Sumari “don’t hang around to cut the grass….” (Again, see Note 10 for Session 732.) Jane and I may be involved with the arts, and impatient at times, but we’re also extremely tenacious when we decide to do something we consider worthwhile. I doubt that the Seth material would exist in its present recorded form if we weren’t that way.

3. In view of Seth’s statement that “Many of the Sumari choose to be born in the springtime,” I decided to poll the members of Jane’s class for their months of birth. At various times, and usually in connection with other subjects, Seth has referred to many of them as being Sumari. Actually, I took my little survey on February 4, the evening following next Monday’s session, but give the rather ambiguous results here because of the predominately Sumari material in this (734th) session. Here’s the month-birth breakdown of the 37 people present for that particular class (including Jane and me):

These figures can hardly be definitive in any sense, however; they’re meant only to point out some interesting directions for study, involving groups and the various families of consciousness to which their members may belong. I’ll simply note, then, that 24 of the 37 students in Jane’s class were born in the first half of the year. From that point on, the figures can be assembled and interpreted in different ways. Obviously they’d change within limits from class to class, depending not only on which members were in attendance, but on which ones are Sumari. Seth hasn’t pointed out every Sumari in class; some have strong feelings about belonging to that family of consciousness, but others don’t.

We may not be able to pin Seth — as that energy personality essence calls himself — down to one physical race, but he is a Sumari: “And a very high lieutenant indeed, I will have you know,” he told us with much humor in his first session on the Sumari family of consciousness, the 598th for November 24, 1971. A month later he offered more insights on his own reality — the kind of information we’re always interested in acquiring (as I wrote in Note 7 for the 733rd session). From Session 601 for December 22 of that year, then:

“As my name basically makes little difference, so does the name Sumari make little difference. But the names signify an independent, unique kind of consciousness that makes use of certain boundaries.

“Your [Sumari] consciousness is that kind of consciousness, and so is mine, except that my boundaries are far less limited than your own, and I recognize them not as boundaries but as directions in which recognition of myself must grow. The same applies to the Sumari as such. In other words, this is not an undifferentiated consciousness that addresses you now, but one that understands the nature of its own identity.

“The point is that I am not impersonal any more than you are, in those terms, and in those same terms the Sumari are also individual and to that extent personal. You are a part of the Sumari. You have certain characteristics, in simple terms, as a family might have certain characteristics, or the members of a nation.”

(It happened that in ESP class last night Seth came through with material pertaining to the nine families of consciousness he’d begun discussing a week ago; see the 732nd session. These class excerpts, which I’ve rearranged somewhat for easy reference, may be used when considered with book material still to come, since Seth will occasionally use the class format to supplement his dictation in our “regular” sessions. The quotations also lead us back to the circumstances surrounding Seth’s delivery of his first session on the Sumari.)

Now these families fall generally into certain groups. In greater terms you can “cut the pie” however you want to, but you will still share an emotional and psychic feeling of belonging with the family of which you are a part. And (with broad amusement) most of you here are Sumari, and it demands great discipline for Sumari to take down lists — even of psychic families!

The Sumari experience began when one family, the Sumari, learned that some class members felt alone in this world — bereft of family, often. A class member lost a father. Ruburt (Jane) lost a parent also. And because of that emotional and quite human experience, Ruburt allowed the Sumari development to show itself….

(I shouldn’t have been surprised last evening to hear Seth say that such an impetus had triggered Jane’s Sumari abilities, for today, when I reread the 598th session for November 24, 1971, I was reminded that he’d said the same thing then. The death of the student’s father had taken place on Thursday, November 11 of that year; Jane’s father, Delmer, died without forewarning on the following Tuesday, November 16; Jane came through with Sumari in class one week later, on November 23; and the next night, in the 598th session, Seth discussed Sumari for the first time.

(Part of my surprise stemmed from what I’d taken to be my knowledge of Jane’s relationship with her father. Her parents had divorced when she was two years old, and since her mother did not remarry Jane grew up without a father.² Jane and “Del” met again, briefly, when she became 21 years old in 1950. After Jane and I married a few years later we occasionally visited her father in various parts of the country — but still, we hadn’t seen him for several years before his death. Yet now it seemed that even beneath that scattered performance Jane’s psyche had felt stronger ties of some kind — at least with Del, if not with her mother — than either of us had suspected; that at least some part of her had sensed a sort of biological or creature loss upon the death of a blood relative. I’d never heard her express such attachments or feelings. Even now she could only link the release of her very creative Sumari attributes, the singing poetry, and prose [as embodied in her novel, Oversoul Seven, for instance], with Seth’s reference to psychic families as well as physical ones.

(And to me, the whole Sumari thing speaks of some kind of compassionate observation or knowledge of the human condition … or in lieu of putting it that way, of an opening up of human awareness to embrace more of the possibilities of consciousness.)