“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane’s ESP class for Tuesday evening, February 25, took place the day after the 739th session was held, and was her last one before we began preparing for our move to the hill house. Sue Watkins was present. During class I read aloud Seth’s material from the 738th session on the Grunaargh family of consciousness,¹ which Sue had tuned in to during the 598th session for November 24, 1971. After class, Sue told us that she believed she’d been associated with the Grunaargh family — in Europe — through printing processes dating from the 1400’s, or possibly somewhat earlier. Since Sue herself is a Sumari, like Jane and me, I asked her to write an account of her feelings, thinking it would furnish a good example of one person’s emotional and intellectual involvement with a family of consciousness other than their own — and yes, of their reincarnational memories of those activities.

“When I first mentioned the family name, Grunaargh (as Seth spelled it out for us in that session over three years ago), I knew that its members had something to do with printing, or the promulgation of printed material. Since at the time I was working as a typesetter,² I figured my impression had derived from that. However, after that session my impression ‘grew’ in such a way that I knew this family had something to do in a more direct way with the printing process — with the fascination of putting ideas down on paper through the use of typefaces that would, as much as the language involved, express the ideas behind the words themselves. In the plant where I worked at the time, I ‘recognized’ several people in the Grunaargh family — all were printers — and with a feeling quite as strong as the recognition I had for Sumari.

“When Seth listed the families of consciousness last January,³ but didn’t include the Grunaargh, Rob asked him about it in the 738th session. In Jane’s final class, Rob read Seth’s explanation having to do with family ‘mergings.’ Right away, right there in class, I knew what was behind the feeling I’d had about this family: Members of the Grunaargh, and I personally, were involved in the invention of movable type. I write ‘were’ out of habit, because I have this delightful feeling that my printing, writing, and newspaper interests now are what led me to be drawn to the same things back then, even as my work there caused me to be interested in the same things now — an exchange across the board.

(That was the end of Sue’s paper. She hasn’t read any history of printing per se. Actually, she told us, the material available to her from that time “could go on” indefinitely. She went on to answer my question:)

2. And Sue is still involved with “the promulgation of printed material.” Now she’s co-editor of a weekly newspaper published in a small town north of Elmira. (Again, see the opening notes for Session 737.)

6. Sue could well be correct here. It’s believed that Johann Gutenberg (1400?–1468) was experimenting with movable metal type in Strasbourg, Germany, before 1448 — but there’s also possible evidence of printing from such type in Holland by 1430, for instance. (And typography itself was known, but not much used, in China and Korea in the 11th century.) In about 1448 Gutenberg became a citizen of Mainz, Germany, where he continued his work. By then, of course, the news about printing was spreading throughout Europe.