“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(It happened that in ESP class last night Seth came through with material pertaining to the nine families of consciousness he’d begun discussing a week ago; see the 732nd session. These class excerpts, which I’ve rearranged somewhat for easy reference, may be used when considered with book material still to come, since Seth will occasionally use the class format to supplement his dictation in our “regular” sessions. The quotations also lead us back to the circumstances surrounding Seth’s delivery of his first session on the Sumari.)

Now these families fall generally into certain groups. In greater terms you can “cut the pie” however you want to, but you will still share an emotional and psychic feeling of belonging with the family of which you are a part. And (with broad amusement) most of you here are Sumari, and it demands great discipline for Sumari to take down lists — even of psychic families!

The Sumari experience began when one family, the Sumari, learned that some class members felt alone in this world — bereft of family, often. A class member lost a father. Ruburt (Jane) lost a parent also. And because of that emotional and quite human experience, Ruburt allowed the Sumari development to show itself….

(I shouldn’t have been surprised last evening to hear Seth say that such an impetus had triggered Jane’s Sumari abilities, for today, when I reread the 598th session for November 24, 1971, I was reminded that he’d said the same thing then. The death of the student’s father had taken place on Thursday, November 11 of that year; Jane’s father, Delmer, died without forewarning on the following Tuesday, November 16; Jane came through with Sumari in class one week later, on November 23; and the next night, in the 598th session, Seth discussed Sumari for the first time.

(Part of my surprise stemmed from what I’d taken to be my knowledge of Jane’s relationship with her father. Her parents had divorced when she was two years old, and since her mother did not remarry Jane grew up without a father.² Jane and “Del” met again, briefly, when she became 21 years old in 1950. After Jane and I married a few years later we occasionally visited her father in various parts of the country — but still, we hadn’t seen him for several years before his death. Yet now it seemed that even beneath that scattered performance Jane’s psyche had felt stronger ties of some kind — at least with Del, if not with her mother — than either of us had suspected; that at least some part of her had sensed a sort of biological or creature loss upon the death of a blood relative. I’d never heard her express such attachments or feelings. Even now she could only link the release of her very creative Sumari attributes, the singing poetry, and prose [as embodied in her novel, Oversoul Seven, for instance], with Seth’s reference to psychic families as well as physical ones.

(And to me, the whole Sumari thing speaks of some kind of compassionate observation or knowledge of the human condition … or in lieu of putting it that way, of an opening up of human awareness to embrace more of the possibilities of consciousness.)