“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Now these notes hark back to the end of the 732nd session, when I wrote a paragraph concerning Sue Watkins, our longtime friend who attends class as often as she can these days from the small town where she now lives, some 35 miles north of Elmira. Jane listed Seth’s families of consciousness last month in Session 732, but wound up the evening’s work thinking that several years ago, soon after she’d initiated the Sumari breakthrough, Sue had psychically tuned in on the name of a second family of consciousness — one that Seth didn’t give in the 732nd session. Jane thought the family name was similar to the “Gramada” that Seth had described; at session’s end I wrote that I intended to check our records for the missing name, and to ask Seth about it — but I neglected to do either of those things. One of the reasons for my failure to settle the matter right away was the lack of any immediate pressure to do so, for we hadn’t seen Sue since before the 729th session was held; that’s over five weeks ago now; newspaper work has often kept her too busy to make the trip to Elmira.

(Sue did attend class last Tuesday evening, however, arriving just in time before it began to read the transcript for the 732nd session. Then during class she handed me a note that I’ll paraphrase a bit here: “In a session on Sumari I witnessed in 1971 or early 1972 — I picked up a family-of-consciousness name, and Seth said it was ‘Grunaargh.’ It wasn’t on the list given last month.”

(Class was a very busy one, with over 40 people present. When Seth came through Sue had time for but one question: Was Grunaargh connected to any of the families of consciousness Seth had named in the 732nd session? “It is indeed,” Seth answered “It is related to one already given.”

(Sue’s note intrigued me anew: After class I promised her that not only would I search our files about Grunaargh, but that with Seth’s help Jane and I would eventually get more information on that family, and present it somewhere in the notes for “Unknown” Reality. The point I want to make here is that others beside Jane can intuitively divine material on the families of consciousness. Actually, for whatever reasons, Sue had glimpsed a family other than Sumari before Jane had. Going through back sessions late this evening, I found what I wanted. Sue had picked up on the Grunaargh¹ during the 598th session, which she’d recorded for me the evening after Jane had made the whole Sumari breakthrough in class, on November 23, 1971.

(Before tonight’s session Jane told me that she felt the Grunaargh represented a variation of Seth’s Gramada family of consciousness. “But the important things are the family characteristics,” she said, “by whatever name. The similarities in the two names are legitimate, I think. There are also family combinations, and these will have their own names.” Then she reminded me that several times during the past week she’d felt that Borledim, the next family of consciousness on Seth’s list, is strongly concerned with parenthood and related roles.)

The next family (Borledim) deals primarily with parenthood. These people are natural “earth parents.” That is, they have the capacity to produce children who from a certain standpoint possess certain excellent characteristics. The children have brilliant minds, healthy bodies, and strong clear emotions.

While many people are working in specific areas, developing the intellect, for example, or the emotions or the body, these parents and their children produce offspring in which a fine balance is maintained. No one aspect of mind or body is developed at the expense of another aspect.

The personalities possess a keen resiliency of both body and mind, and serve as a strong earth stock. It goes without saying that members of one family often marry into other families. Of course the same thing happens here. When this occurs new stability is inserted, for this particular family acts as a source-stock, providing physical and mental strength. Period. Physically speaking, these people often have many children, and usually the offspring do well in whatever area of life is chosen. (Pause.) Biologically speaking, they possess certain qualities that nullify “negative” codes in the genes.² They are usually very healthy people, and marriage into this group can automatically end generations of so-called inherited weaknesses.³

The members of that family of consciousness provide frequent new options. They may be scientists, or the strictest kind of conventional missionaries abroad in alien lands. In your present time they are sometimes Indians (from India, that is), or Africans or Arabs, journeying to your civilizations. They add to the great flow of communication. They may be emotional rather than intellectual, as you understand those terms (pause), but they are restless, usually on the move. They can be actors, also.

(10:30. “I’ve got the feeling he likes that last family,” Jane said as soon as she was out of trance, then added, laughing: “I’ve got the feeling he likes them as well as Sumari. I was picking up all kinds of things about them.” Yet her delivery had been even in pace and emphasis. Now see Note 6 for more family-of-consciousness material.

(Jane had declared before the session began tonight that she thought Seth would go into our house affairs in connection with probable realities, but that such material wouldn’t go with his book dictation on the families of consciousness. I facetiously replied that if the information didn’t fit into “Unknown” Reality we’d “force it to.” I was only half putting her on. Anything on our house hunting, I thought, would be welcome here because it would help unite these late sessions for “Unknown” Reality with some of its much earlier ones [in Volume 1, as it turned out]. It almost seemed as though we’d planned things this way.

There are all kinds of Sumari, as there is great diversity within each family of consciousness.

The first (in Sayre), mentioned far earlier in “Unknown” Reality, you thought was definitely sold, and today you discovered that the sale was not that final.¹⁰ As you discussed these issues a rather important main point escaped your minds: The man who owned the first house (Mr. Markle) was a dealer in antiques and precious stones, utterly devoted to his work and engrossed in it, considering it his art. The house has a garden on one side, with high trees, and a yard on the other, and was relatively shielded. The man’s family took second place to some extent. The kitchen and dining areas were small. He had his office downstairs and he often worked at home. His art came first.¹¹

Your second real estate lady (Debbie), leading you unerringly to the Foster Avenue house, did so for the same reasons. She paints as a hobby.¹² You did not consciously pick out real estate people who had artistic connections, but you were led to them and they to you. You recognized each other’s characteristics.

3. It would seem that a computerized study could be rather easily organized to investigate statements of Seth’s like this one. However, results might depend on whether Seth-Jane could identify enough members of the Borledim who had married partners from other families of consciousness.

6. I listed the families of consciousness (along with simple clues to their pronunciations) when Seth first gave them at 11:14 in the 732nd session. Here I’ll not only remind the reader of the sessions in which Seth described the characteristics of each family, but will try to summarize in a few words the overall function of each one.

See the opening notes for this session, plus Note 1, for material and references concerning the Grunaargh family of consciousness, which is related to the Gramada.

Except for the Sumari, which Jane and I choose to be allied with, there’s much we don’t know about the families of consciousness; the material is all so new. Yet my observation can even apply to aspects of our relationship with the Sumari. For instance, were any of our now-deceased parents Sumari? And regardless of whatever family each of those four people had belonged to, how had their individual family predilections affected their Sumari children? Seth’s data in these recent sessions give us clues, but we need time to put it all together.

In more general terms, how do the members of each family operate through the mechanics of reincarnation? Or of probabilities or counterparts? It’s also important to keep in mind what Seth told us in his first delivery for the 735th session: “Each personality carries traces of other characteristics besides those of the family of consciousness to which he or she might belong … A book would be needed to explain the dimensions of the psyche in relationship to the various families of consciousness.”

And Jane herself has been thinking about the whole subject of psychic interrelationships since holding the 732nd session almost a month ago. She wrote recently: “We regard Seth’s material on counterparts and families of consciousness as excellent explanations — as thematic frameworks that help us perceive and organize facets of our greater reality that are ignored by conventional academic disciplines. Seth’s explanations stand for aspects of reality that usually escape us.

“Now it seems so obvious that there must be such alliances as Seth’s families of consciousness, and that each of us alive at any given time takes part in one or more of such psychic groupings — just as we form, say, nationalistic affiliations on ordinary levels.

7. Added later: See the notes on the hill house at the beginning of the 736th session. In them I wrote about the delay involved before Jane’s and my perceptions of that particular dwelling blossomed within our conscious minds in any meaningful way; the results of that joint metamorphosis are described in sessions 738–39. In the meantime, then, Seth’s material in this (737th) session deals only with the house on Foster Avenue, in Elmira, and — as discussed shortly — with Mr. Markle’s house in Sayre, Pennsylvania, since those two places were the ones we were consciously interested in at the moment. Seth made no predictions, about the hill house or any other, nor did we ask him to.

3. Her conscious self, the recipient of the information, in usual terms, and the portion of her psyche that put it all together.

10. This afternoon Jane and I had spontaneously decided to lay our work aside and go for a drive. We needed the brief change. Neither of us had any conscious intentions of making the trip to Sayre, which lies just across the New York State border in Pennsylvania, some 18 miles east and south of Elmira. We found ourselves doing so, however; we also found ourselves driving past the house we’d considered buying there last year. I received a distinct shock of surprise when I saw the familiar “For Sale” sign still tacked to the front of the house. So did Jane — although she’s never been drawn to it in the way that I am. We’d been informed months ago that the place had been sold. This new joint perception of ours set a whole group of events into motion — all of which were connected to those described in sessions 693–94 (see Note 9).

Seth’s material on Mr. Markle’s feeling for his art, however, is his (Seth’s) own. I couldn’t help here; as a boy of less than 12, I hadn’t been that consciously aware of subjective states other than my own. Although I remember my parents talking about Mr. Markle, I have little idea of how much they may have understood — or misunderstood — his basic life-style.

16. But on conscious levels Jane was too impatient to follow her own inner counsel. See the notes at first break, and Note 8.