“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Besides the physical relationships that each of you know, therefore, you have other brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, on a psychic level; and to that degree, you are not alone. I am telling you this to give you greater leeway. If you do not like the families that you have, you have others to choose from.¹

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.