“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As might be expected, the class hiatus soon began to have a ripple effect: The longer we delayed making up our minds as to whether we’d have the time to resume class, the more Jane’s students began to scatter. The younger people, especially those who weren’t natives of the area to begin with, began to fan out across the nation, and even into foreign lands, continuously searching for more of that indefinable essence or quality many of them called “truth.” They took Seth’s ideas with them, however, and with considerable interest Jane and I thought of them as not only looking for truths but meeting counterparts. Why not, indeed? According to Seth’s views, such encounters with other portions of their whole selves would be inevitable.

We also applied the counterpart ideas to ourselves. Seth named a number of counterparts among class members in the 732nd session — including, for example, a total of nine involving Jane and me (counting the psychic relationships between us) — and I wrote about those connections in Appendix 25 for that session.

As class gradually receded into the past, through our own default, as it were, Jane and I kept in touch with some of our local counterparts from class, while we saw less and less of certain others. Each choice seemed to be a matter of mutual, unspoken agreement among all concerned, and we kept in mind that each individual had the complete freedom to do as he or she wished about maintaining contact with us — just as we had in our relationships with them.

Of my three class counterparts other than Jane, then, it developed that Norma Pryor and Jack Pierce soon embarked upon their own paths, which hardly ever cross mine even though we don’t live that far apart. Peter Smith and I still see each other often. On Jane’s part, one of her counterparts, Zelda, has traveled far away, although maintaining a tenuous, infrequent contact by mail. Jane has met Alan Koch but twice physically, yet feels allied with him. Sue Watkins remains close (to both of us, by the way), even though she now lives in a small community that’s well over an hour’s travel north of Elmira. And Jane has seen her fourth counterpart, “the young man from Pennsylvania …” but once since class stopped meeting.

The longer we went without class, the more Jane and I saw how much its demise paralleled the ending of “Unknown” Reality. Both events were inevitable, we came to understand; both had had their time; our regrets about the finishing of both are real, while simultaneously we heartily agree that the nature of life in this physical — or “camouflage” — reality is one of unending change and renewal. Even though we may never again see many of those counterparts we’d known, we realize that all of us are indissolubly joined. Nor is the fact that a number of us are physically separated (or invisible to each of the others) of great importance, for as Seth told us recently in a private session:

“The counterpart idea is merely a small attempt to hint at that interrelationship — an interrelationship that of course includes all species and forms of life.”