“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As you and your brothers or sisters might belong to the same physical family, so generally are you and your counterparts part of the same psychic group of consciousness.¹ Remember, however, that these psychic groups are like natural formations into which consciousness seems to flow. Your own interests, desires, and abilities are not predetermined by your membership in a given psychic family. Underline that entire sentence.

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

(Neither Jane nor I had expected our unexpected out-of-state visitor, of course. I can note later that Jane dealt more extensively with the whole episode in Chapter 18 of Politics — [and also that it’s interesting to compare our individual accounts of the same event, even though mine is much shorter]. Just let me state here that we found ourselves confronting a well-educated individual who was deeply afraid of her own energy. Because of that fear she had developed certain problems that were severe enough to keep her from working at her profession in the law.

(Barbara insisted that she wanted help, but as in other cases that Jane and I have encountered, her focus upon her distress was so intense that we couldn’t breach it; certainly not in the little time available. Neither could Seth, who eventually came through — a course of action Jane hardly ever allows to happen in that kind of circumstance. Barbara just couldn’t grasp that she was creating her own reality.

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:

“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.

“It is a personal consciousness. The difference in degree, however, between my recognition of my identity and your recognition of your own reality is vast. Do you follow me?”

“Yes,” I said. (I underlined Seth’s phrase above because I think that in it he expressed an important, creative aspect of his reality.)

4. Strange, how things can develop or not in our camouflage reality. I’ll explain what I mean by referring to my two questions for Seth in reverse order. At the end of the 732nd session I expressed the hope that “… we’d soon begin to get the material we wanted …” from him on whether the counterpart and family-of-consciousness mechanisms applied to other species and forms than our own; hence my second question this evening. With Seth’s evident help, Jane herself began at least a partial answer — one that was cut off by our visitor, Barbara, pounding upon our door. Jane’s focus and concentration on the subject were broken, and we didn’t return to it at the time. Not only that: I must note that even several years later we’ve still acquired no Seth material at all on such possible counterpart and family-of-consciousness roles. I also let go (although not consciously and deliberately) my plans to keep after Seth for that kind of information.