“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.

(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.)

These people (the Borledim) believe, then, in the natural goodness of sex, the body, and the family unit — however those attributes are understood in the physical society to which they belong. As a rule they possess an enchanting spontaneity, however, and all of their creative abilities go into the family group and the production of children. These are not rigid parents, though, blindly following conventions, but people who see family life as a fine living creative art, and children as masterpieces in flesh and blood. Far from devouring their offspring by an excess of overprotective care, they joyfully send their children out into the world, knowing that in their terms the masterpieces must complete themselves, and that they have helped with the underpainting.

The Sumari often provide a cultural, spiritual, or artistic heritage for the species. This (Borledim) family provides a well-balanced earth stock — a heritage in terms of individuals. These people are kind, humorous, playful, filled with a lively compassion, but too wise for the “perverted” kind of compassion that breeds on other individuals’ weaknesses.

An artist expects his paintings to be good — or, if you will forgive a jingle: at least he should. These people expect their children to be well-balanced, healthy, spiritually keen, and so they are. You will find members of the Borledim family in almost any occupation, but the main consideration will be on the physical family unit.

(10:01.) Throughout the ages they have served as the spreaders of ideas, the assimilators. They (the Ilda) turn up everywhere. They were pirates and slaves as well, historically speaking. They are often primarily involved in social changes. In your time they may be diplomats, as they were also in the past. Their characteristics are usually those of the adventuresome. Very seldom do they live in one place for long, although they may if their occupation deals with products from another land. Individually they may seem highly diverse in nature, one from the other, but you will not find them as a rule in universities as teachers. You might find them as archaeologists in the field, however.

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.

(Pause at 10:24.) Many of the courtesans who ruled the salons of Europe belonged in the (Ilda) category, then. The Crusades⁴ involved great movement of this family, in which trade and commerce, and the exchange of political ideas, were far more important than the religious aspects. Some members of this family served as initiators of new orders in the (Catholic) church in the past — the worldly Jesuits, for example, and some of the more sophisticated popes⁵ (amused), who had a fine eye out for commerce and wealth. These people may be appreciators of fine art, but usually for its commercial value.

(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.

Neither house expresses your own particular individualistic ways of life, of course, but each one comes close enough to intrigue you, and either one could be made to suit your purposes quite easily. You were attracted also because the people who put their greatest imprint upon those houses so shared some of your tendencies. In the second house your ideas of privacy were shown to you, carried to an extreme, where the windows would not even open. In the first house the stairs to the second floor were purposely steep, and never altered, because no one was invited to view the private family bedrooms. The stairs were meant to be formidable.

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.

(11:25.) Now: When you make any important decision you automatically rouse all portions of your psyche. You set probabilities into motion. The kind of decision to some extent organizes the patterns. This should be obvious. But when you decide to move you are putting yourself in league with others who also make the same decision. Someone who moves will leave a house or an apartment vacant for someone else to move into. Unconsciously, then, the movers are in league with each other. There are sympathetic probabilities set up.

Since you both work at home, those houses do not fit you, generally speaking.¹⁴ Work is not incorporated into daily family life, but certainly exists apart from it — something you find, each of you, relatively inconceivable. You can see farms better, though you are not farmers, simply because there also work and home life are one.

I suggested that you take it (but see my note in the material at next break). It would have been good for you both, but you were afraid of it, and your feelings had much to do with the contract being turned down (by the Veteran’s Administration). That house represented what each of you thought of as unbridled, undisciplined creativity. It was dirty and cluttered. The artist had children who ran about without any control. There was much playfulness there, however, that could have tempered some of your great mutual seriousness at the time. You did not choose to accept such a probability then, any more than you could have accepted my advice all the way. The authorities turned the contract down — but the authorities stood for the inner disciplinarians, and you did not want to share your road with the world; nor did you want, later, to share your driveway (for the Sayre house) with your neighbor.

For that reason, certain so-called city locations could serve you well. That is, Elmira is no metropolis, but there are areas where old homes with grounds exist amid other old homes now given over to offices of one kind or another.

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.

“But the names and designations aren’t meant to be taken too literally; these aren’t to be interpreted as esoteric clubs or brotherhoods, but as natural psychic ‘conglomerations’ to which we all belong.”

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.

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.

15. A note added later: Another house connection is that the place Jane and I were drawn to in 1964 perches on a hillside just west of Elmira proper, as does the hill house. The two are separated in our experience of time by 11 years, but their physical existence is simultaneous: They lie within walking distance of each other — less than half a mile apart — on the north side of the same highway.

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

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.