“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.)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(The next day, Friday, Jane had an auditory “psychic” experience of sorts about the Foster Avenue situation; Saturday morning we made a formal offer to buy the house in question. For our own reasons we offered a low price, and it was promptly refused. The rejection didn’t completely close out our interest here — or Seth’s either — but it did help us put the whole matter in better perspective. Note 8 covers Jane’s inner experience and the details surrounding our house offer. [At 12:06 this evening Seth also refers to Jane’s auditory intuition.]

(Then in Sayre, Pennsylvania, this afternoon [Monday the 17th], we found ourselves participating in house-related developments that took us back in time more than nine months.⁹ Jane and I don’t believe in coincidences. We’d considered the Sayre episodes finished last year; yet today the echoes of those earlier events were so prominent that I came to think of them as actual projections from the past into the present, and so into the future, in a most practical manner. Today Jane and I very clearly felt those connections — or probabilities, if one chooses — developing. Seth remarks upon some of them after break, but the best we can offer are a few hints; otherwise all of these house notes would be much longer.

(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.

(11:43. I told Jane that, once heard, much of Seth’s material had the quality of being so obvious that we in turn seemed to be quite opaque not to have reached the same conclusions ourselves. After considering the alternatives Seth suggested immediately following last break I decided to leave his delivery in place in the session as a guide for the reader; parallels can be drawn with many other situations, I think having nothing to do with art or houses.

(A clarification: Seth didn’t actually suggest that Jane and I buy the “1964 house.” His statements just before break that he did so are distortions on Jane’s part, I would say, while speaking for him tonight; even in trance, her memory could have been in error — or she could have been touching upon another probable reality. What Seth did talk about, and quite legitimately, were the benefits we’d enjoy if we did acquire that place. He discussed the whole affair in the 65th session for Sunday, June 28, 1964, using passages like: “I am certainly not going to make any decisions for you. The house you looked at today should prove an excellent buy …” and, “If you purchase the house …” and, “You will have to make your own decisions.”¹⁵

(“Good night, Seth. Thank you very much.”

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.

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.

Jane woke up. “That wasn’t Seth’s voice, but I recognized it as giving me the answer I wanted,” she told me later. “I had no doubt. It was even clearer because the dream, which I can hardly remember, was so vague. But even after I got the answer I was too worked up to follow it. I wanted to do something, take some action.” The result was that on Saturday we made our low offer for the Foster Avenue place, as described in the notes at first break. We did so mainly to relieve the psychic charges we’d built up concerning it, thinking that if we were so inclined later we could make a higher bid.

2. Her intrusive or “library” self — not Seth. (The library connotations are briefly referred to below. Seth also touches upon them at session’s end.)

As Jane wrote at about this time in her manuscript for Psychic Politics: “So in house hunting I can almost feel the shape of my ideas and beliefs looking for their proper house.” My opening notes for sessions 714–15 each include material on Jane’s psychic library, and Seth himself discussed it in the latter session. Politics, of course, contains extensive material on the same subject (as well as on our house-hunting adventures).

It might be added later here that on succeeding days Jane had several more auditory-type experiences, all involving topics other than houses or “Unknown” Reality. In none of those episodes was she aware of Seth’s voice, per se, but even so we see relationships between them and the time she did hear his voice; see my description of that event at the beginning of the 710th session.

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.

12. Seth didn’t mention that for several years Debbie also taught art in Elmira’s public grade schools.

13. Here Seth touches upon several ramifications involving our house affairs that I’ve been saving to present all at once, if briefly. This note, then, will enlarge upon the fertile field of connections, or probabilities, that is enveloping Jane and me, the houses in Sayre and Elmira, the real estate agents we’ve been dealing with (the Johnsons and Debbie — who are not acquainted), and some other people.

Seth commented that Jane and I would be interested in the Steins’ home in Sayre. Not so. We looked at it today in passing after the Johnsons told us it was for sale; the truth is, we saw nothing about it that turned us on.

14. A couple of weeks later I felt considerable humor upon rereading Seth’s statement here: See the notes about the hill house, inserted at the beginning of the 736th session.

17. Surely Seth’s information about Jane’s auditory experience would have been very interesting — but I must note much later that we never received it.