“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(See Appendix 26 for some of the family-of-consciousness material that Jane delivered for Seth in ESP class yesterday evening.

(“I’m at the point now where I know what Seth’s going to talk about,” “Jane said a few minutes before the session began. “I feel funny waiting, though — edgy, or restless. Maybe it’s the wind. Seth’s there, but he doesn’t quite make it through….”

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(I wrote down two questions for Seth, and read them to her:

(1. Granting Seth’s concept of time: Does the reincarnating personality usually choose to experience its simultaneous lives through various families of consciousness, or is it more likely to remain “loyal” to one such family in all of them? At the start of tonight’s session Seth had remarked that generally speaking counterparts are part of the same psychic family, but I wanted to know if reincarnating personalities are also.

(After listening to me discuss the second question for a couple of minutes, Jane said she had an answer to it, or at least a partial one. Her material was presumably from Seth, although she would give it. Just as she began speaking she was interrupted by a heavy knocking — first at the door to the public hall that separates the two apartments we occupy on the second floor, then at each of the apartment doors themselves. A feminine voice cried out for Jane. We waited. The persistent racket, penetrating the wind noise, meant just what we thought it would: an end to the evening’s session. When I opened the door I faced a comely but very agitated woman whom I’ll call Barbara. She was probably in her early 40’s. An expensive suitcase sat beside her.

(“Aren’t you expecting me? Seth told me you would be. …”

(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.

(Now see Note 4 for material concerning the two questions I’d noted at 10:01.)

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:

“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.

If we’d encouraged him to begin answering question No. 2, then, Jane and I assume that as time passed much of his succeeding work would have been changed and enlarged in scope to some observable degree. Seth could have based future sessions upon the additional conscious knowledge already given us; we’d have possessed the larger frame of reference necessary to accommodate even more new material.