“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“It seems so hilariously logical that the Sumari, who are creators, would want to ‘merge’ with a family more prone to organization,⁴ to come up with what they would need to spread ideas: movable type. Otherwise, how would they ever get up the gumption to sit around and carve out all those damn little characters? Too exasperating!

(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.

“My heavyset friend was filled with the thrill of knowing that now words would spread faster. This is hard to specify, but he had the same feeling I have now about newspapers — the daily spreading out of ideas, and the kind of tremendous power behind that ability … I can see that corner of his shop/work area clearly in a half-light, illuminated by a candle in an enclosed mesh lantern sitting on a tabletop. This man had several apprentices, and he was a real artisan, putting ideas across in the form of movable type. I know that Gutenberg is credited with this invention, and probably rightly so; but I also feel this as one of those discoveries that appeared in several places at once, and that my beefy fellow’s shop was in the general vicinity of Gutenberg’s — in Germany? I can’t recall. This idea was ‘shared’ in many places at once, then.⁶

1. I want to note here that at the same time Jane and I decided to buy the hill house, we learned that the house next door, to the west, would soon be for sale; because of a job transfer its owner would be moving with his family to California this summer. [...]

(And now verbatim:) The fireplace in the hill house is advantageous, as the one in the house on Foster Avenue would have been, simply in that the open hearth represents an inner source of strength and stability. [...]

[...] Two evenings a week would be quite effective.