“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Yet creativity kept escaping the work definition—in my books, Seven and Sumari; and he even felt guilty about Sumari poetry in work hours, for it might not fulfill work’s requirements, produce money and so forth.

[...] You picked up the idea of work but frowned upon certain aspects of creativity as not safe or profitable—as your father’s creative, inventive aspects did not produce financially in your family, and in terms of work did not pay off in social or family terms.

Now I told you that when issues are brought out into the open, there are certain conscious stresses and strains that earlier were not apparent, but hidden. [...]

[...] He had seen your family’s reaction to you as an artist. [...]

[...] Whatever reservations she shows—her conscious inhibition of impulses, for example—are learned devices that are literally protective in nature. [...] For now, though, I present what I have to work with from the saddest, most mournful Sumari song she’s ever created and sung. [...]

That evocative, prophetic line is from a Sumari song that Jane sang to herself a few days before she went into an Elmira, New York, hospital on February 26, 1982. Sumari is a “language” she can speak or sing while in trance, and which she can translate into English if and when she wants to. [...]

[...] If she’s just eaten, for example, her body focuses its resources upon digestion, with perhaps conscious lapses resulting. [...]

[...] We do this as individuals, as members of the family, the community, and members of the species. [...]

[...] ² Now that is an excellent suggestion, given by the conscious self to other portions of your being. The results of such a suggestion would also follow your conscious beliefs, however.

[...] This meant for about three hours; Sumari had been included, too. [...]

[...] I will say more about this later in the book, but it explains for example why a diet-watcher, suddenly determined to lose weight, may meet with veiled or even open resistance from family or friends; why the person who makes new resolutions may find himself baffled by associates’ ridicule; why the alcoholic trying not to drink finds others tempting him quite openly, or teasing him into indulgence by hidden tactics.

You must therefore understand and examine your beliefs, realize that they form your experience, and consciously change those that do not give the effects you want. [...]

[...] So the families of consciousness operate at adjacent angles, and each family teaches the other family something.

[...] Now Seth diverged to give perhaps a page of data on the family of consciousness that Sue Watkins came up with in 1971 or ‘72. [...]

[...] Both houses have Sumari characteristics, but in different combinations. [...]

[...] The families do not exist in isolation.

So the psychic families, or the families of consciousness, can be thought of as natives of inner countries of the mind, sharing heritages, purposes, and intents that may have little to do with the physical countries in which you live your surface lives. [...] In the same way, all the members of any given psychic family are spread across the earth, following inner patterns that may or may not relate to other issues as they are currently understood.

(Just before the session Jane began to edge into an altered state of consciousness other than the one she uses for her “Seth trance,” as she put it. [...]

Certain families have a liking for certain months of birth,⁴ but no specific rules apply. [...]

[...] (Long pause.) You are not subordinate to some giant consciousness. [...]

I think most people would agree that Jane’s singing in Sumari is extraordinarily original, and that she’s an excellent natural dramatist. [...] She was fully aware that that quality became much more obvious in her class singing and sessions, but she didn’t have to consciously evoke it—the drama was just there. [...]

[...] In Jane’s Adventures in Consciousness, see Chapter 7 for her thorough discussion of how she began to speak and sing in her trance language, Sumari, in November 1971.

Occasionally Jane will record a Sumari song when I’m out of the house; I may hear her play it later, but I don’t “bug” her about sharing it with me. [...] As Seth does, they represent one portion of her psyche offering reassurances to another more conscious portion, in our terms; they deal with her questioning of the reality she’s creating in the finest personal detail—her wanting to know why she’s made her choices, her determination to press ahead, her embracing of our beloved earth and our universe. [...]

[...] For although we didn’t know how they’d done so, our suggestions had helped her tune into a number of dear images of her girlhood in her hometown of Saratoga Springs, New York: She’d seen herself at an amusement park—Kaydeross—located on the shore of Saratoga Lake, just outside of town; she’d seen herself “jumproping very young” in the recreation field across the street from the Catholic grade school she had attended; she’d seen and interacted with family members, all dead now. [...]

[...] Jane also sings in Sumari occasionally, and has written down a few short songs in that “language” without translating them. I’ve been careful to collect for our own records the prose, sketches, poetry, and Sumari she’s produced during this time of healing and testing.

[...] Jane may not be always conscious of what she wants as she confronts her own projections in physical reality, but strong portions of her psyche are (and I think this applies to everyone).

[...] As related to Jane’s physical symptoms, they have remained largely unconscious phenomena: We knew all along that we were often having “symptom dreams,” but didn’t recall them consistently enough to be able to do much conscious work with them. [...]

[...] How am I involved in any of these, and how are Jane’s and my families—and reaching how many generations back in ordinary time? [...]

[...] I said that I understood his answer to my question all right, but yet that I felt there were still things there to be discussed; that in individual cases, for instance, the subconscious could go too far when there was no need to, and that in such cases it seemed to ignore the wishes and desires of the conscious personality involved. [...]

In between excellent health and death through disease, in between wealth and perhaps gluttony, and poverty and starvation, in between a glittering social existence, the comfort of a family, and the utter loneliness of isolation, there are literally infinite variations and gradations of behavior, according to individual differences and prerogatives. [...]

[...] He must also remember Sumari time, for the creative imagination works no matter what you are doing.

[...] Then during a class in November 1971, she first gave voice to her trance language, Sumari; so besides the other class material she had several more stages of consciousness — if very dependable ones — to deal with in Adventures. [...]

[...] She called the chapter “Personal Evaluations — Who or What is Seth?” In it she made a number of excellent points concerning her relationship with Seth and Seth Two; for example: “If physical life evolves [in ordinary terms], why not consciousness itself?” The questions we had at the time can be found throughout the chapter. Indeed, we still have many of them — or, I should note, we’re still intrigued by the latest versions of those “old” questions, for like consciousness itself they’re endless in their ramifications. [...]

(In July 1971 Jane began a book to be called Adventures in Consciousness, based on the experiences of her students in ESP class. [...] Class was now providing a wealth of material on reincarnation, various states of consciousness, and out-of-body travel. [...]

(The material itself of course, came from another state of consciousness, and this Jane called her “aspects channel.” [...] And Jane put it all together; the class experiments she’d started out with in 1971, and all of the later material, became Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology. [...]