“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane and I consider Seth’s concept of counterparts to be an intriguing psychological framework, spacious enough to serve as a workable thematic structure in which the social and nationalistic characteristics of our species can be studied, as well as the components of the individual psyche. That is, the private person is here seen as interacting with others because there is, beneath our awareness, an inner “person-to-person” relationship connecting each individual with his or her physical counterparts, though they may well be living in other parts of the globe while sharing the same historical period. It follows, then, that one may or may not ever meet a counterpart “in the flesh” — may or may not even suspect the existence of such relationships.

(The material on counterparts emerged from Seth’s treatment of reincarnation. Along with his addition of simultaneous time, I’d say that the concept of counterparts provides reincarnation with a novel approach indeed; and that our awareness of both has always been latent within the reincarnational framework, whether in simultaneous or linear terms.

(Now I’d like to present a batch of notes, ideas, and excerpts from sessions about reincarnation, counterparts, and related data, pulling them together into a coherent picture. Although reincarnation and its variations has been discussed by Seth almost from the very beginning of our sessions, the subject didn’t represent one of our own main concerns. For that matter, Jane almost actively resisted such information in the past. She still says comparatively little about reincarnation on her own, although Seth shows no such reservations.

(Actually, we’ve had two recent indications that Seth was going to initiate something like the counterpart thesis, even though he hadn’t used the term itself. The first clue came in a private, or deleted, session held a week ago on Monday night [November 18, 1974]; the second hint was given in ESP class on the following evening.

(“Okay. I really want to know all about it. But at some other time.” (After that, we gave up and went to bed. In ESP class the following night, Seth indicated that he was ready to expand his concepts of personality still further — though, again, he didn’t mention counterparts per se. He started by commenting on my experience with Maumee once more. Then he continued.)

(The material in these recent excerpts rather prepared us for Seth’s introduction of counterparts, then, in Session 721. In ESP class the next evening [on November 26], Seth began contending with some of the questions that instantly arose as a result of his new material. I’d just read aloud portions of the 721st session when one longtime student, whom I’ll call Florence, commented that there “has to be a balance between each of us and our counterparts.” Speaking strongly and humorously, Seth immediately took over the discussion.

Now our Florence is working with her own ideas of good and evil, searching for what she thinks of as an aesthetic and moral code that she can rely upon. Her counterpart had that code, but found that he could not count upon it. Each is working on the same series of challenges. There are also two other counterparts. Between the four of them, the century is being covered. (To Florence, smiling:) I will tell you about that at another time. It is not my suspense story — it is your own!⁴

(Florence: “What you said about my counterpart in China makes perfect sense to me.”

Now in your terms only, these other counterparts are like latent patterns within your mind. Echoes. How many of you have actually thought of what the unconscious may be? Or, the voices that you hear within your mind or heart? Are they yours? To what counterparts do they belong? And yet each of you, in your own identity, has the right to do precisely as you wish, and to form your own reality….

(And, later in the session:) I will give you an example. There is a member of the class — and (with obvious amusement) I will close my innocent eyes so that I do not give the secret away — but there is a class member who is indeed a fine Jesuit, handling problems of great weight, having to do with the nature of religion. There is a renegade priest who has been in this class, and who ran off to California; he likes to put the boot to theology and “do his own thing.” There is also an extremely devout woman who lives in England. All of these counterparts are dealing with the nature of religion. They are experiencing versions of religion because it interests them.

[Each of] you will create the attributes of reality that interest you and work with them in your own way. If you want to study the nature of religion and do a good job of it, then you must be among other things a skeptic and a believer, and an Indian and a Jew, say. Otherwise you will not understand anything at all, and have a very lopsided picture. And (to a black student) you cannot know what it is like to be black in this culture — you may not agree here — unless you are also white in it…. Now I return you to yourselves and to your counterparts.

(“Well,” I said to Jane after class, as we discussed the Chinese-American situation cited by Seth, “I don’t know about counterpart relationships in other kinds of realities, but it’s certainly obvious that at least some physical counterparts can hate each other …” So the larger self, I thought, would be quite capable of seeking experience through its parts in every way imaginable. Although it might be difficult for us to understand, let alone accept, the whole self or entity must regard all of its counterparts as sublime facets of itself — no matter whether they loved, suffered,⁵ hated, or killed each other or “outsiders.” Within its great reaches it would transform its counterparts’ actions in ways that were, quite possibly, beyond our emotional and intellectual grasp. At the same time, the self would learn and be changed through the challenges and struggles of its human portions.

(On more “practical” levels, we thought that behavior among nations might be changed for the better if the idea of counterparts were understood, or at least considered — if, for instance, many of the individuals making up a country realized that they could actually be acting against portions of themselves [or of their whole selves] in the persons of the “enemy” country, and so modified the virulence of their feelings. The nations of the world would benefit greatly from even a small improvement in their relationships with each other. And if an individual strongly disliked a counterpart in another land, wouldn’t this quality of emotion be detrimentally reflected in the person doing the hating?

(So far we’ve been dealing with the idea of counterparts in our own physical reality. By way of contrast, however, Seth stated last month in the 713th session, after 10:32:) Nothing exists outside the psyche, however, that does not exist within it, and there is no unknown world that does not have its psychological or psychic counterpart. (Before that, from Session 712:) To some extent or another, there are counterparts of all realities within your psyche.

(Continuing to trace such references back through the material, I’d like to direct the reader to several passages from the 683rd session for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality; in them Seth contends with variations on the counterpart theme as they’re developed in certain other probable realities:)

(Seth’s material on counterparts did make us wonder about Jane’s and his earlier uses of the word and its concepts. Checking backward through past sessions and Jane’s poetry, I soon learned that her intuitive grasp of the term had always been truer than mine, for I’d carried the idea that “counterpart” implied a status of opposites rather than the complementary one it really does. Seth also used the term in its correct sense.⁷

(The entire poem, Dear Love, which Jane wrote for me in December 1973, can be found in Note 3 for the 713th session. I want to repeat the first verse of it for obvious reasons, although all of the poem is an excellent creative exposition of counterpart ideas:

What counterparts break

(In Chapter 19 of Personal Reality, I found this line of Seth’s in the 667th session for May 30, 1973:) For reason and emotion are natural counterparts.

(Ten sessions earlier, there’s a particularly evocative reference to counterparts in the 657th session for April 18, 1973, in Chapter 15 of Personal Reality. In retrospect that material seems to be a clear indication of the later development of the counterpart concept — and one passage could well refer to “Unknown” Reality long before that project was ever thought of as far as Jane and I were concerned. Seth:)

… those selves are different counterparts of yourself in creaturehood, experiencing bodily reality; but at the same time your organism itself shuts out the simultaneous nature of experience.

(During that same month in 1973 Jane wrote Apprentice Gods, a long poem that’s included in Chapter 16 of Adventures in Consciousness. In the poem she probed for the origins of our personified gods, and referred to counterparts as follows:

bigger than life counterparts,

Quite literally, the “inner” self forms the body by magically transforming thoughts and emotions into physical counterparts …

Now whenever you think emotionally of another person, you send out a counterpart of yourself, beneath the intensity of matter, but a definite form.

… the so-called laws of your camouflage physical universe do not apply to the inner universe … However, the laws of the inner universe apply to all camouflage universes … Some of these basic laws have counterparts known and accepted in various camouflage realities.

(And what about the very first counterpart references in our sessions? In Chapter 1 of The Seth Material Jane described how we began these sessions [on December 2, 1963] through our use of the Ouija board. During the first three sessions the material came from a Frank Withers — who, it developed in the 4th session, was one of the “personality fragments” making up the Seth entity, or whole self. Just before Seth announced his presence to us in that same session, Frank Withers spelled out a remark through the board that meant little to Jane and me at the time: “One whole entity may need several manifestations, even at simultaneous so-called times.”

(Though Frank Withers never used the word “counterpart,” we see now that this can be a reference to the concept of simultaneous reincarnations, to that of counterparts, or to both.

(Seth himself first used “counterpart” in the 6th session for December 11, 1963. At the time — and for a long while afterward — his employment of the word meant little, if anything, to Jane and me. The newly begun sessions already contained a number of unfamiliar terms and ideas: In the 4th session three days earlier, for instance, Seth had just given us our entity names [Ruburt for Jane, Joseph for me], and touched upon the psychic links connecting the three of us. Any subtleties afforded by concepts like counterparts would have quite escaped us. For that matter, at the time we didn’t know whether or not the sessions would continue. Nor were we particularly concerned about the issue.

Part of same entity or counterpart.

(And so 11 years were to pass before Seth began his outright discussion of his very provocative concept of counterparts.)

A published relationship in which Seth, Jane, and I took part, one that’s innocent of counterpart overtones as far as our material indicates, happened in Denmark in the 1600’s. In Seth Speaks, see Session 541 for Chapter 11.

4. Seth never did tell Florence any more about her other counterparts, though. Nor did she ask him to; she worked with the information he’d already given her, plus whatever she could divine for herself.

8. A longer version of this material from the 657th session is presented in Note 3 for Session 683, in Volume 1; I wanted to tell readers a little about counterparts then — not only to get them interested in Volume 2 before it was published, but to show the direction in which Seth’s material was headed.

Return o my brother, counterpart of heaven,