The "Guide" and "Key Points" for this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not things Mike said during the lecture. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).
Introduction
Session 732 centers on counterparts: discovering counterparts should be approached with a playful, relaxed, childlike curiosity; being overly serious will only keep you from finding them. Soul mates and twin flames are merely variations of the counterpart concept, and they must not be turned into an exclusive pursuit of union. Seth also explains that counterparts are relationships on the spiritual level, not fixed pairings in three-dimensional life; and he lists nine families of consciousness, briefly introducing the characteristics of the Sumari family. The whole chapter emphasizes the connection between play, creativity, and spiritual development.
Key Points of This Chapter
- Discovering counterparts relies on play, relaxation, and intuition; being overly serious and tense actually prevents you from finding them.
- Soul mates and twin flames are just another version of the counterpart idea; pursuing exclusive union and impossible communication will suffocate the sense of play and creativity.
- Counterparts are relationships on a psychic level, not fixed pairings in three-dimensional life; the same person may "be and yet not be" a counterpart at different periods.
- Human beings have nine families of consciousness; individuality determines affiliation, rather than category determining individuality. The Sumari family is anti-authority, individualistic, fond of play, and only creates without managing.
- Play conceals the secret of creativity and existence; trying too hard to maintain a reality or a relationship will negate its creativity and thereby lose it.
Main Text
Counterparts: The Importance of Play and Spontaneity
This section comes from The "Unknown" Reality, Volume 2, Session 732, titled "Your Relationship with Your Counterparts, the Importance of Play and Spontaneity, and the List of Families of Consciousness." This session began on Wednesday, January 22, 1975, at 9:10 p.m.
Seth began by saying that he had talked about counterparts in Jane's class, and when many students tried to understand the concept, they became extremely serious. Some asked him to identify their counterparts for them, asking Seth, Who exactly is my counterpart?
There was a student named Fred, a contractor, who rarely spoke. He did not ask Seth who his counterparts really were. Instead, during the previous week, while sitting there toying with the general concept, he let his own creative imagination wander freely. Remember, letting creative imagination wander freely is crucial. He played with the idea--he played with the idea of "counterparts." In other respects, his experience was like a child's experience: he was open, curious, and full of enthusiasm. As a result, he discovered several of his counterparts on his own.
What does this mean? After we have learned the concept of counterparts, do not rush into life as if holding a magnifying glass, looking everywhere to see which one is my counterpart, treating the matter with extreme seriousness. When you are too solemn, too earnest, too tense, you really cannot find it, and it has little meaning for you. Your state of mind should be relaxed, like a child playing a game.
But most people are so extremely serious, so overly concerned with who their own counterparts are--there is another person in this world who comes from the same soul as me, and they want to know exactly who it is--that they doubt their own creativity. Because they cannot find them, they expect their products in the world to be unreal or invalid. They feel that if they cannot find their counterparts, then their expected result is impossible--that there are no genuine counterparts, or that the idea itself is invalid.
But there is a great relationship between what you think of as creativity, altered states of consciousness, play, and spiritual development.
Between what you think of as creativity, altered states of consciousness--the state we want to reach; only in altered states of consciousness can you perceive some information or awareness from unknown realities--then play, and spiritual development, among these there is a tremendous interrelationship. We must remember this.
When you create a poem, a song, or a painting, you are in a state of play, enjoyment, and freedom. All artists understand this: in the creative process they throw themselves into it selflessly, like a small child. In fact, they are playing, deeply absorbed in their own enjoyment. You intend to make something different, to make a new version of reality--you simply want to create something new, to create something that did not exist. You do it for the sake of experience, creating out of love.
At one time or another, almost anyone has had that experience--creating for love, creating for experience. Children often have that experience; they are always creating. Inside their little heads they make up songs, make up music, make up pictures. A child's creativity is extremely strong: give them some mud and they can play for a long time. They constantly shift their focus of consciousness, and they do not stop to ask whether the game is real or meaningful. Children are very earnest when they play; they do not ask whether the game has any meaning or what useful knowledge can be learned from it. They only need to be happy playing.
Physically, play develops the functions of their bodies, and it also exercises the great abilities of their minds. So if you deprive children of the right to play, then you have really underestimated the importance of play--in other words, you have wiped out one of the child's most important avenues of learning.
When you think life is supposed to be serious, that life should be solemn and proper, and you decide to put childish things aside, when you make your child study Olympiad math and other rigid things, then you often cannot see your own creativity, and you also erase the child's creativity. You become so deadly serious that you cannot play. Even spiritually you become like this: spiritually very tense, and your spiritual development becomes a goal that must be achieved--I must reach a certain spiritual state; I must do such and such in the first month, such and such in the second month, and then achieve a certain goal, and this goal must be achieved through hard work. Every day you meditate and do practices very diligently, sometimes forcing yourself to do them when you do not want to, because this goal has to be done every day. You have turned spiritual development into ascetic work, into a very arduous goal to complete.
As long as you believe this, you will not understand what the psyche is, and you will not understand what spirituality is. You want to pursue spiritual development, but you do not even know what spirituality is; how can you develop? In the appendix of the last part of Seth Speaks, Seth gives a very beautiful definition of spirituality. You can go look there; he specifically discusses what spirituality is.
I keep returning to the analogy with nature.
But plants do not strive to develop their potential.
He does not strive; remember, he does not strive. Not striving is a normal state. Do not think that you must strive, must be diligent, must progress vigorously every day. They do not become beautiful because they believe they have a responsibility to make you happy when you look at them--they do not feel it is their duty to make themselves so beautiful just to please you. They are beautiful because they love themselves and love beauty; they simply like beauty. It is like what many people say: "A woman dresses for the one who delights in her," as if a girl only dresses up beautifully for the person she loves. But you would misunderstand that: when a girl has no partner, she also dresses herself beautifully. She naturally loves beauty; she does not do it for anyone.
When you are so serious, in terms of understanding your own spiritual nature, you are almost always distorting it, because you cannot let down your defenses long enough to discover its truth. You relax for a moment, you say I want to relax, but then a moment later you become tense again--Oh, my level is still not enough; I still have not reached some state; look at how so-and-so is doing. You do not let go long enough. You keep looking for new rules, new regulations, or new methods of training--this is the most common thing in spiritual circles: he keeps switching, feeling that after practicing a certain method for a while it has no effect, so he goes and tries something else. He constantly seeks and tries new rules and new methods; he is too tense. You constantly look for a new super master or a more advanced guru to make you follow discipline or to point out the road ahead for you. Many people are like this in spiritual practice, looking for a teacher every day. But as we all know, one of the most common sayings in spiritual circles, and one that is indeed true, is that you do not need to go looking for a teacher; the teacher will come to you. Why is it said this way? It is telling you not to keep searching outside everywhere. Settle your heart and turn inward to explore, and your teacher will naturally appear. If you go out every day to pay respects to teachers and learn skills, visiting famous mountains and studying everywhere, you will not learn much.
In their own way, children are very aware of their own counterparts and of other portions of their individual realities. In dreams they meet their counterparts, and sometimes they regard them as invisible playmates. Many little children say, I have a little friend you cannot see. They often talk to themselves and speak to their playmates, and even treat their little dolls and toys as their playmates.
But you are so afraid of losing the rational adult self you know that you ignore that communication with counterparts.
People used to write here asking about soulmates--called soulmate--in certain circles, in many spiritual circles, this is a very popular idea lately. That was in the 1970s; now it is even more popular. Every day people ask whether so-and-so is their soulmate, or whether we are twin flames.
This concept is an old concept; it is built on the reality of counterparts and presents another version of that theory--what you call soulmates or twin flames is actually just another way of expressing the core idea of counterparts.
But again, it is treated with an almost pompous seriousness.
This is something everyone should pay attention to. Do counterparts exist? Yes. Do soulmates exist? Yes. Do twin flames exist? Yes. But their scope is very broad. Do not handle this matter with special seriousness, as if unless you find a twin flame to be your partner or find your soulmate, you will not marry. You take this matter so seriously and then every day scrutinize the boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife around you--Is he my soulmate? Is he my twin flame? Why doesn't he look like it to me? Should I go outside and find another one? Many people treat this matter with an ostentatious seriousness, and this is wrong.
Many people who use this term use it to hide rather than release their own capacity for pleasure.
This sentence is very important--what can I say, it is an eye-opener. "Their own capacity for pleasure" refers to the content and enjoyment within sexual relationships. He did not say it outright; he was speaking implicitly: many people, by searching for soulmates or twin flames, are actually deliberately hiding their normal, legitimate pursuit of sexuality and their own capacity to give themselves pleasure. They say, I have not found my soulmate, so my sex life is not harmonious; I have not found my twin flame, so we cannot reach that state of oneness. Many people even specifically study hypnosis or something like that; they always want to get the experience they hope for through such things. When they have not found it, they do not experience it at all. They feel that it is of a lower level--if sexual relations cannot help their spiritual practice in the way they think, then they would rather not have them.
Seth points out sharply here: What are they doing? They are actually hiding--the ability they should have to allow themselves to feel pleasure--they use this term to escape.
Then they spend time looking for their soulmate, but this search involves them in a pilgrimage, pursuing an impossible communication with another person in which all boundaries are lost. Then the two try to merge into a solid oneness, suffocating all sense of play and creativity.
Many people, through seeking soulmates or twin flames, get drawn into a pilgrim-like journey of searching, as if it were some sacred and great matter, and without achieving it their lives would remain incomplete and imperfect--especially among women this tends to be more obvious. Some people use this name specifically to take advantage of women; they are not really trying to find a partner at all. Some women are truly stubborn and really want to seek this thing.
But what exactly are they pursuing? This pilgrimage is after all a dead end. Why? They are seeking an impossible communication--they want to achieve a state between two people that is simply impossible. What state do they want to achieve? They want two people to be like one person, with no boundaries between them, all boundaries lost, two people completely merged, and then the two try to merge into a solid oneness--just these two, no one else, becoming one like twin flames. In their so-called practices, techniques, including some hypnotic exercises, they feel that only in that state can they reach their so-called union--yin and yang have merged, man and woman have joined together, the soulmate has finally found the other half, and the two souls are from now on complete. Twin flames are similar.
Seth says, What are you doing? You are suffocating all sense of play and creativity. You have taken this matter--which is originally very creative; in the process of lovemaking and in intimate relationships, it is originally a playful and creative process. Is it not playful? Is it not creative? For example, sending flowers on Valentine's Day, doing romantic things on anniversaries--the romance girls like best. If you step outside and let others look, do they not seem like children playing house? Is this romance not like a game, not like a kind of creation? Is this romance not created? This is what a normal intimate relationship is like.
But then you make it very ritualistic and sacred: the two of you must perform all kinds of rituals, burn incense, purify yourselves, put on certain music, place candles in a specific environment, and only then begin your physical intimacy--as if only under such a ritual and such procedures can you achieve some kind of state. If you want to pursue this, Seth flatly rejects it for you--this direction is fundamentally wrong.
Why is it wrong?
Because you are not a part or half of another soul. You are not always searching for your partner, and unless you are completed by your soulmate, you are like an unfinished product. These are all false ideas.
You are a soul, you are whole, you are inherently self-sufficient, so why would you still lack half? Moreover, you yourself have countless fragments, countless selves, countless probable selves. In other words, the soulmate you are looking for is actually yourself. The person many people keep circling around, from a spiritual perspective, is he not you? Do not forget, it is built on the concept of counterparts--what are counterparts? You come from one soul; you are just different expressions, different attempts, experiencing in different contexts and backgrounds. So, to put it bluntly, you are in love with yourself. You have made it so mysterious and so complicated. From this perspective, you are inherently self-sufficient. But we do not feel that way; we feel that we necessarily need something outside ourselves.
This is a problem that everyone runs into in their view of romantic love: they need a relationship in order to demonstrate the existence of their love; their love must have an object. But once the relationship is fixed, it is dead; once it is fixed, it is exclusive; once it is fixed, it loses its flexibility, its creativity, its playfulness--it suffocates all other possibilities. This way of locking into a relationship is a state that humanity has formed over thousands of years; it fits social development and social stability, and there is no problem with that. But from a spiritual perspective, it is not necessary; this is a key point.
The core point is this: if you can feel the existence of love without depending on a relationship--in other words, if you yourself are love itself, you are inherently self-sufficient. You let this love flow through you from the universe; you can love children, love flowers, love grass, love the friends around you, love all people, and of course also love your boyfriend or girlfriend, your husband or wife--they are also loved by you. But you are not the exclusive kind, not the one-and-only kind; you are a channel of love, and you are love itself.
When many people seek love, they are lacking love--it is not that they have love they want to share with others; they need to seek love from others. For various reasons, they feel incomplete, and they need an opposite-sex partner to help them become whole. At such a time, if you can become love itself without relying on a relationship, then you are at a very high level. If you cannot do that, then what should you do? You must first love yourself.
Is loving yourself also a kind of relationship? If you can love yourself well, love yourself unconditionally--no matter what you are like, what mistakes you have made, how unsatisfactory life is, how unsatisfying your current state is, you can love the you of this moment, all of you, the whole of you; you can accept all your own shortcomings, all your own problems, and of course also accept all your own good points. If you can love yourself to this degree, then when you go to love others, think about it, is it not the same? You can accept the flaws in them, and you can accept them as they are. This is a true expression of love. If you do not even know how to love yourself, and you say you want to love others, that is very dangerous--you are not going to love others; you are grasping for something, asking for something.
Seth directly shatters this for you here, shatters your wishful thinking, shatters your fantasy--you are too rigid, too single-minded, too exclusive, and you have completely thrown away the core of love.
Seth repeatedly emphasized this in the earlier material, and I will repeat it--What is the essence of love? True love, true love, is not the narrow little romantic love between men and women; we are talking about the true love in this world. What is true love? It is freedom, eternity, and unconditionality. The prerequisites are freedom, eternity, and unconditionality.
What is freedom? It means love is not subject to any limitations; love just loves, without any status, identity, environment, or conditions. Why do we say that the love between teenagers is true love? Because at that time there are no conditions; they do not think about whether your family has money, how many houses you have, what your background is; they do not think about these things. Love just loves. Whether it is hormonal impulse or physical attraction, it does not matter; but in that love, they are very pure, without conditions, free. They do not seek repayment. That unrequited love and silent longing happens most often in the teenage years: they silently love a girl or a boy, maybe for two or three years without ever saying it, silently watching and caring, loving with deep affection.
It is just as Tang Xianzu always said in The Peony Pavilion: Love does not know from where it arises, yet it grows deep. 1 This is the line he wrote in The Peony Pavilion, and it is still not outdated today. You do not know how it comes; it does not know why it begins, yet it grows deep with feeling.
What does eternity mean? It means that once you have loved, it is eternal. When two people truly love each other, even if it lasts only a moment, only a day, only a very short time, that love is still eternal. In the lives of the two people, it exists like eternity. It is not about how long love lasts; but we have secularized the idea that "love is eternal," adding the label of worldly time--saying that for love to be eternal means a lifetime, from birth to death. Does that count as eternity? Can it be called eternity? It is only a few decades. You may feel that your life is this short and you have given your whole life to this love, so it is eternal--from the perspective of the physical world, it may indeed look that way. But if you have studied spiritual knowledge, you know that these few decades of human life, compared with the whole of your spiritual development, are truly as brief as a flower blooming for a moment. How can you call this brief blooming moment eternity?
You may grow old together and live out a lifetime; do you think that counts as eternity? That can only be called eternity within the narrow human understanding. What is true eternity? Seth once spoke a poetic passage--a cloud drifting across a lake, leaving its reflection on the water, a beauty like that. The feeling between the cloud and the lake water, in that instant, is eternal. He used the image of a reflection between a cloud and a lake to tell you what eternity is--that moment is forever fixed there, forever exists there, it will never disappear. It is always the feeling, the heart-stirring, the beauty, the resonance between the cloud and the lake in that instant when the cloud passes over the water. This feeling is something beyond language, beyond words, beyond time. Seth says this is a state of eternity. But we human beings cannot understand it; it is hard for us to grasp this point. We insist on seeking eternity within time, but we clearly know that even time is an illusion, so where does eternity come from? If you place eternity within the framework of time, then you have truly found the wrong scale and the wrong direction.
To put it more plainly: one day, when you truly reach a state of spiritual attainment and travel through various reality spaces and dimensions, exploring and moving among them, you will discover that what truly enables you to cross time and space, to move back and forth through different incarnations, through hundreds and thousands of years, pulling you, attracting you, or guiding you, is that love, that emotion. It remains fresh over time. At that time you will find that what allows you to establish connections with them is this emotion, this love. But it has already surpassed the narrow, exclusive, small romantic love between men and women that we usually talk about; it is the state of true love.
To put it more vividly--in this invisible, multi-dimensional space-time that we cannot see, what densely crisscrosses it, what sustains it, what establishes connections within it, what connects the fourth-dimensional world, the fifth-dimensional world, and the third-dimensional world, is this emotion. For example, after you die, when reincarnating, what determines where you will be born and where you will reincarnate is definitely that emotion--definitely the thing you cannot let go of, the thing that haunts your dreams. But remember, that is not necessarily the one with whom you had the closest relationship in the third-dimensional world. Do not confuse the third-dimensional world with the multi-dimensional world; it is often not necessarily the most intimate one. Only when you reach that level, in that multi-dimensional dimension and world, can you know what true emotion really is and what true love really is.
Third, love is unconditional. When you love someone, you cannot set conditions--saying I love you so you must love me, I love you so you must treat me well, I love you so you must put my name on the property deed, I love you so you must bear me a few children, I love you so you must hand over your salary card to me--all these are conditions. True love sets no conditions; love just loves. Moreover, you wish them well. If one day they leave you to move toward a happier and more fulfilling life, you genuinely give them your fullest blessings. You do not feel jealous, you do not hate them, and you say, You have found someone more suitable for you, and I truly bless you--this is true love. Not many people in this world can usually do this, but it is not that none do.
Why have I spent so much time on this subject alone? Because many people are quite obsessed with this matter, especially women. On the spiritual path for women, this love barrier is not easy to pass; they keep going around and around, falling down on it and getting back up, then getting up and falling again.
Seth has already punctured this point here. This quality of play is a very important point, and our ancient ancestors understood it most clearly. What the ancestors studied most clearly was precisely this matter between men and women--in ancient times called the arts of the bedchamber, the Jade Maiden Classic, and so on. Our ancestors studied this matter far more deeply than the Western sexologists, many years earlier, and they directly grasped the essence and root of the issue, grasped its quintessence. Simply put, the core of the bedchamber arts--if two people want to be harmonious in sexual life--the most essential point, which the ancestors ultimately identified, is the character "xi," meaning playful delight. But this character "xi" is related to the character for drama or play--it is written with the woman radical beside the character for delight. It is the "xi" in laughing playfully, scolding playfully. In fact, in ancient China it was believed that if the bedchamber arts could be described in a single word, that word would be this "xi." If you grasp the essence of this "xi," you have grasped the most essential part of the bedchamber arts. So everyone listening today, whether male or female, remember one point: mastering this single word is enough.
So Seth here again emphasizes this point, using very refined language and a very gentlemanly way to point it out to you--do not suffocate its creativity and playfulness. Remember this phrase: play and a sense of creation. Do not kill the playfulness and creative feeling in intimate relationships--whether in creating a romantic relationship, in the communication of intimacy, or when you actually get into bed, you must always maintain this sense of play and creation, so that the relationship can often remain fresh and new. When Seth said this, his eyes were shining--he himself felt this issue was very important and wanted to speak about it thoroughly.
When you become too intent on maintaining your reality, you will lose it, because you deny the creativity upon which it depends.
This statement is very blunt, and also too penetrating. Remember, there is a "too much wanting" here -- it is not that wanting to maintain a reality is wrong; maintaining a reality is a normal need, a legitimate one. The problem lies precisely in that word "too." You cannot want it too much. The more you want to maintain a reality, the more you will lose it. Because what are you denying? You are denying the very creativity that this reality depends on. If you want too much to maintain this reality, are you not strangling its creativity? You do not dare let it move, do not dare let it undergo any change. When it has no creativity, when it is fixed and unchanging, then it is lost, and this reality cannot be maintained either.
This is what we often say: only within change can you maintain what is unchanging. If you always try to maintain something stable within the unchanging -- whether it is a relationship or a reality -- you cannot maintain it. That is why the foremost classic of our ancestors, the I Ching, is said to be the head of all the classics of Chinese culture. Because "yi" -- the meaning of "yi" is change. China gave the head position among all classics to the I Ching precisely to tell you that the world can only exist within perpetual change; once it stops changing, it dies.
Especially when it comes to relationships between the sexes, to twin flames and soul mates, the same applies here as well. Seth puts it rather tactfully -- if you want too much to maintain a relationship, even an intimate relationship, a marital relationship, a marriage, when you want too much to maintain this relationship, the relationship will often be lost. Here I must remind all the boys and girls: the key point is, if you want too much, too much to maintain it, if you maintain it at all costs, it will instead be lost. Everyone understands this principle; they just do not believe it, and are unwilling to face it squarely.
I am not denying the importance of true reason... Obviously I am not telling you to ignore your intellect, but you often ignore the playfulness of the intellect, and force it to be less than it is.
I am not telling you to ignore your intellect or your reason. On the contrary, it is you who ignore the playfulness within that intellect and reason, and you make it less -- you keep only its solemn, serious part, and castrate all its playfulness and creativity. I am not saying that you should just go play games and mess around, that is not what I mean.
So many of you have daydreams, in which you actually see yourself become that counterpart.
And while you are doing your daily work, parts of their lives will sometimes come through -- I think everyone has had this kind of dazed moment. Some people have a fleeting daydream, very short, extremely short, maybe just a few seconds, or for some a little longer, ten or twenty seconds. Then you discover that you seem to have been somewhere else doing something else, and suddenly you come back to yourself -- was I not doing something? Just now was I not driving somewhere? How could this happen? This is very typical. Those may all be things that counterparts are doing. This is a process of leakage between times and spaces, and it happens occasionally. But you do not pay much attention to these things; you think it is just your imagination.
The unknown reality lives within your own psyche. In all of your experience, there are hints of them.
In your terms, if you did not first imagine yourself as you are, you would not be alive.
This sentence is very interesting, and it is a key point. You think those counterparts are all imagined -- like daydreams. Earlier you were told to go play, to think about your counterparts with a curious, childlike mindset -- many people say, is that not all just made up by me? How could there be such a counterpart? I have never seen one. But even this you who is alive right now was imagined into being by yourself. So how can you say that what you imagine is not real? You must highlight this sentence.
In fact, in terms of you personally and of the human race as a whole, play is one of the most practical methods of survival.
Not the only one, but one of them. If you strangle this, then your ability to survive loses a large chunk. To put it bluntly, you as an individual and the human race as a whole can exist precisely because play exists.
Within its framework are hidden the secrets of creativity.
Within the framework of play are hidden the secrets of creation. In play we have creation, and within the secrets of creation are hidden the secrets of existence -- one ring nested within another. Do not underestimate play. The games children play among themselves and the games adults play are the same. Many boys are obsessed with playing games, and girls are also obsessed with playing games. The games girls play are not quite the same as boys' -- what girls like to play is: I am friends with you, I am not friends with her, the three of us are friends, we are not friends with those two, or I am prettier than you, my boyfriend is more handsome than yours, and so on. She plays this kind of game. She may not necessarily love playing the fighting and killing games that boys play, but she is still playing games. Including among animals, including in early humanity, including among human children now -- all learn through playing games.
The importance of play is far greater than you think. How many people in the whole world are playing games? A game research institute did a survey, and roughly 3.5 billion people in the world play games regularly2. Does this number exceed your imagination? You did not expect that so many people in this world are playing games, did you?
The life you consider real represents only a very narrow layer of even your actual physical experience.
Here I am not talking about those other realities of the physical dimension that could be added -- does our physical dimension not also have many other versions? Many parallel space-times, and those are also physical realities. Do not think that yours is called physical reality and theirs is not, and do not think that theirs is an imaginary space. Seth says, I am not talking about those probable realities; I am talking about your present reality, your current one.
Play gives you a necessary rest, allowing you to temporarily set aside your distorted concepts of selfhood.
It lets you relax and return to normal.
And many of the world's finest inventions came about when the inventor was not focused on work, but was absorbed in recreation or play.
You have had more or less direct dealings with some of your counterparts. Others, however, live in different places, and still others may have no intersection with you at all, and are sometimes separated by differences of age and culture.
Because the differences are too great, these make it very difficult for you to relate to them.
Intuitively, you know who your counterparts are in your daily experience.
By intuition, you know. But this does not mean that if you become conscious of such alliances, you will necessarily feel obligated to form a culture of counterparts, or to affect other people's lives by reminding them of your counterpart relationship.
If you pay a little attention and observe, you can discover, through your intuition, in a relaxed state, in a playful frame of mind, who your counterparts are. But even if you discover your counterparts, this does not mean you must go remind them that the two of you are counterparts -- there is no such need, and do not go developing some kind of counterpart culture. He emphasizes again: do not go around every day saying so-and-so is a counterpart. It is enough that you know it yourself; there is no need to tell others every day, or to affect other people's lives by reminding them that you share the same counterpart relationship.
Seth says it very tactfully, but the meaning is: do not use the relationship of so-called soul mates or twin flames to change or influence other people's family lives. If you are developing a purely spiritual friendship, that is fine, it is normal. But if you therefore say, I am your counterpart, let us live together, that is not good. This passage of Seth's is specifically addressed to such people -- do not go running off to tell someone just because you discover that you and so-and-so are counterparts.
Each of you is an individual. You are all independent.
Some people you detest from the bottom of your heart may be your counterparts. Why do you not go live with those people you detest? They may also be your counterparts. Do not think of counterparts as something beautiful and blissful, some kind of wonderful rapport. Why have you never thought that it might be the person you clash with every day? It is very likely that it is the person you dislike the most. So Seth raises this point here: do not go looking for people. The ones you look for are probably all people you like, and you do not go looking for the counterparts you dislike -- that is not appropriate. If you are going to look, look for all of them. Why do you only look for the ones you like, the handsome ones, the good-looking ones, or the ones who are your type?
In the later interpretation, Teacher Xu gave an example: many mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships, those love-hate mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships, are in many cases counterpart relationships. You did not expect that, did you?
Each of you may be exploring different facets of the same overall challenge.
You are independent individuals, but you are challenging different layers of one big challenge. For example, what is the challenge in a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationship? It is that both love the same man. The daughter-in-law loves her husband, and the mother-in-law loves her son. These two women both love one man, so of course they are competing for his affection. On the surface it is not the same kind of romantic rivalry between a man and a woman, but are they not also competing for attention, competing emotionally? Otherwise, why would that classic question arise: if the wife and the mother both fall into the water, whom should the son save first? Is that not a struggle over love, over one's place in the son's heart? Are they not facing the same challenge, the same problem? It is just that their roles are different, and the facets of the challenge are different. If mother-in-law and daughter-in-law could both understand that what we are fighting over is this, and that we both love this man, then the moment they suddenly understand this, they will stop quarreling.
There is nothing mysterious about family.
There is nothing mysterious about family relationships. They represent the relationships you take for granted. For example, in a family, your relationship with your brothers and sisters is sometimes just so-so, not even as close as your relationship with friends. Some people's relationship with their own parents is also just so-so, not that close, not even as close as their relationship with other people's parents -- but that is perfectly normal. The same applies to counterparts -- it is the same among counterparts, and there is nothing that mysterious about it. It is not that if the two of you are counterparts, you must live together, or you must be together every day. How long has it been since you last saw your brothers and sisters, since you last had a meal together, or even since you last called each other? They are still your own brothers and sisters.
If you think about counterparts in terms of this kind of family relationship, you will understand. It is just that you are ordinarily not familiar with these terms or concepts.
However, certain family members often act out specific roles, because the family is a whole. One of them may be an arrogant fellow, while another is a very humble and very excellent overachiever.
Psychologists nowadays often treat the family as a whole by allowing different members to see the tendencies of certain family members that they may have exaggerated, while sacrificing others. Many psychologists now treat patients this way -- they no longer look at one person alone; they look at the whole family, because the family is like a whole. For example, Professor Lu at the art healing center in Guangzhou3, when he treats children, he asks the parents to come along. He does not treat the child alone. He will say that this child's illness is mainly connected to the parents -- the root of the illness lies in the parents. For a relatively young child, the family environment and the parents' behavior are often the root cause of the child's illness.
For example, the arrogant one may display a bold facet that all the other family members have suppressed. Through this person, the others can indirectly share in the excitement or suspense of experiences that would otherwise be blocked.
For example, suppose a family has an eldest son who wants to cover and protect his brothers and sisters everywhere. He is simply overbearing, whether outside or at home, always in that macho state, wanting to take charge of everything, unbearably arrogant. Actually he has no real ability -- the eldest son at home may not even earn as much as the second son, nor develop as well; his actual strength is less than the second son's. The second son says nothing, keeps quiet, but he does well in school, studies well, and earns more money. But there is no way around it: at home it is still the eldest son who makes all the noise, as if he manages everything in the family, and yet he is the least capable person in the family. The less capable he is, the more he fears others looking down on him, and the more he blusters.
On the other hand, the overachiever may completely hide such impulses, and will not be proud or arrogant. But at the same time, he faithfully expresses the other family members' desire for excellence and discipline.
Others also want to be excellent, others also want to get into a prestigious university, others also want to earn a high salary, to be a white-collar worker, to be an executive, but others did not achieve it, while he achieved it on their behalf.
Now the same applies to counterparts.
Those counterparts in your experience can show you, in an exaggerated way, your own abilities that you did not choose to focus upon. Those counterparts express in an exaggerated way the abilities that you have not manifested in this current body. This is a very typical characteristic.
So sometimes counterparts are often the opposite of you -- but this opposite is not the kind of positive-negative opposition you understand. Teacher Xu put it rather incisively: this is more like the mutually generating and mutually restraining relationships of yin-yang and the five elements, rather than a simple black-or-white, white-or-black relationship. The relationship between them is relatively complex, and cannot be explained by a simple oppositional relationship.
Counterparts and the Family of the Psyche
You can learn a great deal from your counterparts, because they represent those potentials in you that have not been developed; and they can also learn a great deal from you. The counterparts you encounter will, to some extent, work, play, or live within your own culture.
This does not mean that you are some fragmentary piece of a hypothetical whole self. Seth says, you are not, as it were, a fragment of a complete self, a broken-off part, where all of you counterparts added together would make up the whole. Although you are each developing different potentials, that does not mean you are only a part; you are also a whole.
Then he gave an analogy. He said, let us pretend that your psyche is a plant, then in many respects it sends out its own leaves, and each leaf grows into a new plant under different conditions; and after growing into plants, those seeds further send out new variations, new versions. From any single tree, a handful of seeds may fall in the same backyard, while others may be blown by the wind beyond the woods before they land.
He talks about counterparts as if the same soul were a plant, and those seeds might grow right around it, or they might grow very far away.
Then he used another analogy: the family. You ordinarily live with your physical family, although that is not always the case. Sometimes your ancestors came from different countries. This is less common domestically, but very common abroad — often in a family the grandparents, the father, and the mother all live in different countries. So there is a physical family tree that you understand, a real family tree, and often there are family gatherings, when relatives from far away also return to this family.
Now on a psychic level, the same applies to counterparts. If you belong to any particular group — whether a religious group, a social group, a company group, or some other art class, interest class, yoga group, dance group, fitness group, it is all the same — very often your closest counterparts will also be there. You have many counterparts; some are very far from you, but some of the near ones are often right within your group. Incidentally, from their point of view, you would be a counterpart. Many political, civic, educational, or religious groups are made up of counterparts.
So within our circle of Seth students, are there many counterparts? Yes. Otherwise you would not have come together for no reason at all.
These counterparts form your family of the psyche, which is a representation of the family on another level. First of all, such a group has an inherent focus — for example, it may be political, civic, religious, or gender-based, such as feminism, or whatever, it does not matter. The group certainly has a certain purpose, and that is their focus. Certain members of that group express tendencies that other members have suppressed, yet each is supported by a common sense of belonging. For instance, if one person in the group is very lively, then he expresses the inner, lively part of those team members who are very calm and steady — they themselves have not expressed it, but within the group it is expressed by someone else. So sometimes the group seems to have its own overall identity, as if there were an overall personality, in which each member plays a role and together they form a whole. Any reader, by examining the groups to which he belongs, can easily discover this point, and discover the complementarity among the members of their groups.
In physical terms, there are races, and there are psychic counterparts of races. The families of consciousness are all related to one another, so to speak, yet each has its own overall integrity and specialties.
In our three-dimensional world, there are races, such as yellow people, black people, such as Asians, Europeans, and so on. On a psychic level, there are also psychic races, which he calls families of consciousness, that is, psychic races. Our skin color may represent our racial race.
For example, most of the people who came to Ruburt's class belong to the Sumari family of consciousness. In addition, there are eight other such psychic races, making nine families of consciousness, families of consciousness in all.
Certain of Ruburt's students are counterparts of one another. Many who came here returned home in the way that members of a physical family attend a wedding. The students who came to this ESP class were like members of a large extended family gathering for an old grandmother's birthday, coming from various places — since they were all near New York — to attend Ruburt's class, like a family gathering, returning psychically, spiritually, to their psychic home.
Seth said, if you like, you may use false names below.
If you are concerned about their privacy, you may use false names.
But he did not use them. He came right out and said, Peter Smith is a counterpart of Joseph. This is very crucial. Do you remember the previous session? He said — he said Peter is not a counterpart of yours, but the two of you have a deeper kind of psychic connection. But in this session, he again says Peter is your psychic counterpart. Later Rob will ask about this.
Then he pointed out many people, saying that Sue and Zelda Man were counterparts of Ruburt. Sue was one of the students in their class, and with Ruburt, the three of them were counterparts. He then went through a whole list of who was a counterpart of whom, who was a counterpart of whom.
The Families of Consciousness: Sumari and the Other Eight
Seth went on to say that the Sumari family of consciousness are naturally playful inventors, and they are relatively unconstrained, relatively unfettered. However, they are impatient. You can find them in the art world, or in the less conventional scientific circles -- not the traditional scientific circles like mathematics, physics, and chemistry, but in some of the more obscure scientific fields, you can find members of the Sumari family of consciousness.
In the unknown reality, you have inner alliances. I will outline these inner psychic families, and it is up to you to discover which family you belong to.
Seth said, you can take a break, or we can end the session here. I still wanted to keep listening. Then Seth said again, I am using the group of students in Ruburt's class as an example, but again, this applies equally to any group -- other groups are the same, and there is a high probability of counterpart relationships among them.
Seth went on to talk about how the Sumari family of consciousness is willful, anti-authoritarian in a certain sense, and full of energy. They are usually individualists -- remember individualists, I explained earlier what an individualist is -- they oppose any kind of system, they dislike any system, they only like being independent. Yet they are not natural reformers. Although they hate all kinds of systems, hate all kinds of rigid conventionality, and oppose all authority, they are not natural reformers; they will not change anything. They do not insist that everyone must believe their concepts, nor do they demand or insist that others believe their things. But they are stubborn: although they do not demand that others believe them, they are stubborn in that they insist on their own right to believe their own concepts. They believe others have the right to believe their own concepts, and there is no need for others to listen to them in return, and they will avoid all coercion. They do not like others coercing them, and they do not coerce others. They are extreme individualists; they firmly defend your right to believe your own concepts, but they also believe in their own right to believe their own concepts. You cannot persuade them, and they will not try to persuade you. This is a characteristic of the Sumari.
In the class, Emma Harris and so-and-so and so-and-so are counterparts. He said you and Jack are counterparts, but you and Emma are not. He named many people. He said that to my readers, these names are meaningless. Indeed, because they have nothing to do with us. But in each case, the relationships mentioned point to inner knowledge and connections -- none of this is important; what is important is that in each set of counterpart relationships, I have pointed out their inner knowledge and connections. This same reality also appears in each of your lives.
Trailwell, Petoski, and Ben -- this Will and Ben, to abbreviate, the two of them are counterparts. Will is that William who came to sit in on the previous class, a very intelligent young man. He takes pride in it, and although he tries hard to show that he is the same as everyone else, that he is very humble, he is extremely intelligent. On the other hand, Ben completely trusts his own intuition and relies on his own intuition, but is somewhat afraid of his own abundant energy. In many ways he is still a child, and absolutely spontaneous. Will dreams of having spontaneity, yet even in an open group, among adults who freely play with the concept of spontaneity while not entirely trusting it, Ben's spontaneity still becomes embarrassing. Ben is afraid of the intellect; he fears that the intellect will pull him down, pull down his intuitive things. What is he actually saying here? He is saying that Ben and Will have a counterpart relationship, but their personalities are completely different: one is extremely intelligent, with very high intellect, and strongly believes in reason; the other, Ben, only believes in intuition, only believes in emotional things, particularly dislikes rational things, and believes in spontaneity.
Any group will display different kinds of interrelationships.
You can see that in different groups, there are different interrelationships.
Within the family of consciousness called Sumari, just as within any physical race, there is great variability.
And the other psychic families also have great variability. Just as in our lives, even if we are all Asian or all Chinese, the variability is enormous, the differences are great. Within psychic families, the families of consciousness are the same -- it is not that everyone in one family of consciousness is the same; their differences are also very great.
You choose to be born into a particular physical family with your brothers and sisters, or as an only child, either way. Generally speaking, your counterparts are born into the same psychic family as your contemporaries.
When Seth was about to read out the names of the nine families of consciousness, Rob said, do you want to spell these out? Because I do not know how to write these names; they are not names we would normally understand. Seth, with a light tone, as if singing, spelled out eight names for him, and then he added Sumari to the list, making nine in total. These nine names do not matter; he just made up the names, names chosen at random.
Now, these categories are not the most crucial thing; your individuality is the most crucial thing.
This must be remembered. It is not that once you belong to a certain family of consciousness, you are influenced by it; like once you belong to a certain zodiac sign, you are influenced by that personality. No, none of this is important. What is most important is yourself. You have certain characteristics of your own, and these characteristics place you in a certain position. But because you are not a rock or a mineral, but a living individual, your individuality places you in a particular family or species of consciousness, and this represents your overall view of reality. You must remember this -- which family of consciousness you belong to is not innate, not something you are born with. It is because of your personality; whatever kind of personality you have, you belong to a particular family or species of consciousness. Do not get it backwards.
Do you want to be an originator, a follower, or a giver; or do you want to create a new version of an old system; or do you want to create new systems; or do you want to deal mainly with healing information or physical data; do you want to deal with visions and sound dreams, or to transfer your inner data into psychic data useful to your society. These points are all core characteristics of the different families of consciousness. So, you choose a certain focus, just as you chose your physical family in advance. After you choose your focus, your individuality develops, and you belong to that particular family of consciousness.
Then the session ended.
Jane later remembered that Suwah Jones was connected to the name of the second family of consciousness that Seth had proposed, but that was something from a few years earlier, shortly after Jane brought through the Sumari concept. He seemed to say that Su belonged to another family of consciousness, but Jane now mused that the problem was she did not think Su's family was on the list Seth had just given; it did not seem to be on that list. When we were having a late-night snack, Jane really did receive data supposedly from Seth, but she was not sure. She said, what are psychic families, families of consciousness like? They are like an overall emotion of yours, an emotion you carry with you throughout your life, that one dominant emotion.
Two Notes
First note. At the beginning of the session, Seth said that Fred, in a playful or curious way, found several counterparts of his own. He did not ask Seth, "Who are my counterparts? Tell me," nor did he take it too seriously; he just kept playing with the concept of counterparts. While playing with the concept of counterparts, he found several very pleasant, externalized pieces of information received through visual images. In them he saw two counterparts of his own generation: both were women, one a farmer in Turkey, around sixty-two or sixty-three years old; the other very tall and handsome, also a woman, a clever black woman in her twenties, a socialite living in California.
Second note. In Seth Speaks, Seth talked about the soul, and there was a very sharp discussion. He said,
A group of cells forms an organ; a group of selves forms a soul. I am not saying you do not have a soul you can call your own — you are part of your soul, it belongs to you, and you belong to it.
But at the time Jane was very uncomfortable with this matter; Jane was quite disturbed, because she did not like the concept of a collective soul. She did not need the concept of a collective soul or a shared soul. Jane still preferred to have a single soul, just for herself. Actually, at that stage, at the stage of the book Seth Speaks, the concept of the soul was still rather elementary. Seth did not know how to explain it either; at that time he brought up a lot about the relationships among soul, oversoul, entity, and the individual, as well as fragment personalities and reincarnation. But after you have studied further, it is like this: once you have learned high school physics, you can throw away middle school physics; once you have learned college physics, you can throw away high school physics. It is the same — you no longer need to get hung up on those things. But Rob was still rather rigid; he always wanted to check whether what Seth said before and after was consistent. The moment he found an inconsistency, he became very alert and went to verify it — "This is not the same as what you said earlier." Because he still had a somewhat Western mind, always hoping that the theory would be consistent from beginning to end.
That passage of Seth's about counterparts feeling aversion toward one another is quite chilling. He said, and my discussion of this kind is not without foundation either. Using the members of the ESP class as a general example, Jane and I often noticed that her students showed all kinds of different feelings toward one another — for the same event, their reactions were different, ranging from the most positive all the way to the most negative. Regarding Seth's statement, with the theory of counterparts, a person can have, to whatever degree, a fresh recognition of the emotions and motives secretly lingering between certain individuals, feelings that sometimes surface as aversion. Seth's viewpoint can give you some new understanding of why certain people have different states, and why you dislike someone.
Rob's Doubt: Are Peter and I Counterparts or Not
He began writing this Note 4 only a few weeks after Session 732. He said I have had some time to sort out certain things, and to let others happen. But at the very beginning, when Seth mentioned that my friend the painter Peter Smith was a counterpart of mine, I immediately felt a wave of uneasiness rise up in me. After I checked Session 724, I confirmed why that reaction made me uneasy—because Seth had said in that session,
Peter and I are not counterparts, although we are connected closely enough that in a certain way you share some of the same psychic memories.
I wondered why there was such a contradiction. Neither Jane nor I believed that there was any error in my records of Sessions 724 and 732. Why did Seth say in Session 724 that the two of us were not counterparts, and then in Session 732 say that the two of us were counterparts—wasn't this a contradiction? Rob intended to ask Seth to clarify this matter very soon.
It was through Sue that Peter was introduced to Jane and me in 1973—and he confirmed that a few months earlier, Peter had told him about something that he now felt was the same psychic event I had tuned into a few weeks before. What was that psychic event? Peter's experience had occurred in 1967, while Rob's event had occurred just a few weeks earlier. What was the event? It was that both of them had seen a fourth Roman. Peter saw a fourth Roman in 1967, whether in a dream or in some other state; and Rob, in the previous few weeks, had also seen this fourth Roman—the first three had already been described. Through inner images, I saw that in the first century A.D., in Jerusalem, I was that traitorous Roman soldier, and the counterpart died a terrible death. Rob saw that at that time, he was a fourth Roman soldier, a traitor, who was captured and then executed—and the gruesome sight was truly horrifying.
Before I had time to ask Seth, to ask Seth whether Peter and I were counterparts, Sue had enough time to think about this subject on his own. The following is a shortened excerpt of several concepts he wrote down at my request. Sue said, I thought that perhaps what Seth said in Sessions 724 and 732 was more accurate than the situation we had imagined. What if at one time, Peter and Rob had been counterparts, and after achieving a certain purpose, somehow they became no longer counterparts. Once you kill your enemy, and thereby also kill yourself, like that Roman soldier in Jerusalem, and understand him—does something change in the understanding and connection of counterparts? Do counterparts slide in and out of their relationship with each other, their association with each other, according to the needs, beliefs, and experiences of the personalities currently involved? What Sue meant was: do counterparts become each other's counterparts according to their respective current beliefs, the needs of the personalities, and their differing present experiences, and then slide out again, and no longer be each other's counterparts? This was one of Sue's own understandings.
As Seth had said before, and as we felt, I think that in terms of differences in age, creative abilities, patterns of belief, and so on, there are obvious connections among Peter, me, Rob, and Jane. I don't think the four of us are currently involved in a counterpart relationship, only that perhaps we once were, or that our friendship is a memory of that kind of connection, or that we recognized certain possibilities in each other, or possibilities corresponding to that.
Then he went on, saying that a few days earlier, when I was thinking about my fascination with sixteenth-century England in the time of Henry VIII, a thought came to me: I wondered what had become of Henry VIII by now. Suddenly it occurred to me that perhaps, in linear terms, Henry is now many people—I think he has several offshoots or counterparts living at the same time. He said I was wondering what had happened to Henry VIII by now—does he still have many counterparts existing in this era? So, theoretically speaking, you could bring together all of Henry's counterparts, have them alter their consciousness to a certain degree, and from them put together a startling, astonishing, multi-layered, multi-faceted portrait of Henry VIII. Of course, this must assume that those people would be willing to accept such subjective experience as valid. What a magical and strange view of history—and possibly a truer view of history than the one we are familiar with. What Rob meant was: could I gather together all of Henry VIII's counterparts, and then have them share a common psychological recognition—we are all counterparts of Henry VIII—and then in that state, could I paint a portrait, overlaying the portraits of all these people, to form a multi-layered, multi-faceted composite portrait? And that would represent a complete aspect of Henry VIII. In this way we could know what the overall, complete aspect of Henry VIII was like, rather than just a single aspect. He said this might possibly be the truest and most correct view among all the historical viewpoints I am familiar with.
Seth's Clarification: Spiritual Counterpart Relationships
Then Seth, in his own way, confirmed Sue's interpretation of my question. In one of the sessions they deleted, he must have asked Seth this question -- whether the two of them were actually counterparts. Seth said, perhaps I may be mistaken, but I do not believe so. I believe I did not put your and Peter's material into the dictated text of the book, in order to keep that material from being too difficult for readers, although you still chose to include Session 724 in the book. He said, why did I not want to include it? He did not want everyone to make this knowledge too complicated, because counterparts are more complex than you think. I wanted to simplify it, but you insisted on putting it in, so there was nothing to be done -- that made the material too difficult. Why? He said,
In essence, you and Peter are and are not counterparts.
Interesting, isn't it? The two of you are both counterparts and not counterparts. You do share a memory of the psyche, for example that memory of the fourth Roman, and you jointly hold the memories of those selves who lived during the era of your fourth Roman soldier incident -- both of you still have that memory. And at this time, both of these people are painters; Peter is also a painter, and Rob is also a painter.
Those memories exist as a pattern. This pattern is not a single existence; it is not that this memory exists only in one particular person -- it is a shared existence. And in this lifetime, each of you came together and separated again, came together and separated again, forming a counterpart relationship. When they suit your purposes, they are like streams of consciousness, mingling together and then separating.
What does he mean by this? You may find it hard to understand. What he means is this: what is the relationship between these counterparts and that which is above them (let us simply call it the soul -- though the concept of the soul is also not quite adequate, so let us just call it that for now)? What is the relationship between them and the soul? It is that when they come into the human world, they separate, each doing their own thing, and then after death they return to the whole soul; then in the next lifetime, they separate again. That is what he means by coming together for a while, then separating, separating and then coming together again. Can you understand what he means? While in the human world, in the physical world, you are separate; but when you return to the spiritual level, you are joined together again. That is what he means. Only in this way does a counterpart relationship form.
When exactly do they separate and when do they merge? It suits your purposes, your needs -- just like streams of consciousness, they mingle and then separate; it is the same principle. These counterparts have a common stream of consciousness; they mingle together, these consciousnesses join together, and then they separate again -- this stream of consciousness can also separate, just like units of consciousness. That is the concept he is talking about.
To say this again, it actually gets rather complicated, and it will make you more and more confused, and you will not be able to understand it. These counterparts are a relationship of the psyche, a spiritual relationship, not a physical relationship. In other words, you and your counterpart -- for example, you and your elementary school classmate, the two of you are counterparts -- in this you must understand that it is not that the two of you are counterparts in a physical sense. You must understand this. You are counterparts on the spiritual level. The reason Peter and Rob are both counterparts and not counterparts is precisely because a deviation occurred in this understanding. Rob firmly believed that counterparts must be physical counterparts, that only these individual people existing in the physical world can be called counterparts. Seth's meaning is that the person does not matter -- whether they are called Zhang San, Li Si, or Peter does not matter. They are counterparts because they are counterparts on the spiritual level. Everyone must not confuse this, because it is very easy to confuse.
In the deepest terms, this relationship flows into historical time and flows out again. From a deeper perspective, this spiritual relationship both enters our historical time, lives for a few decades, and then flows out of our historical time. In the truest terms, it is a consciousness like this: within historical time it divides into several counterparts, and when these people finish, they return to a spiritual family, or a whole. They are like this -- sometimes entering our three-dimensional world, sometimes leaving it, sometimes entering, sometimes leaving.
In your terms, some of these are relationships maintained for a lifetime. Others, however, represent a few points where psychic healings occur between two individuals.
There are also some who, at only a few points in time, experience psychic healings between two people -- having that kind of telepathy, that sense of unspoken understanding, or that feeling of instant connection upon first glance -- but it is discontinuous. However, these may not be any less intense. The fact that they are not continuously together does not mean that those chance encounters or brief unions between them are not intense; on the contrary, they may be extremely intense, extremely interesting.
For example, you may live with your husband or wife for a whole lifetime and feel almost nothing; then suddenly you may chance upon someone, and perhaps the two of you only meet once, at a class reunion, or at some very coincidental gathering, and somehow the two of you come into contact without knowing how. But this does not mean that this single encounter is not intense. You know, some people keep what is in their hearts to themselves and will not tell others. How many women are there whose most beloved person in their hearts -- some of them cannot even name him. I do not mean that kind of relationship; it is just that she may have only met him by chance, or there was only a brief opportunity, a single point in time when they came into contact, but then they quickly separated, because circumstances and conditions did not allow it. But this does not mean that the brief time of their union was unimportant or not intense -- it may even surpass the frequency of a lifetime of emotion, surpass the keynote of a lifetime of feeling.
Seth is saying here that the relationship between counterparts is rather complex, not what you think. You have definitely identified counterparts -- Zhang San and Li Si are counterparts, so these two are always counterparts? In this lifetime? No. They are a counterpart relationship on the psychic or spiritual level, not a counterpart relationship on the physical, material-body level, or the interpersonal counterpart relationship within your three-dimensional world. They are the counterpart relationship on the spiritual level behind all that. Do not think about it from a three-dimensional, materialized perspective; if you think that way, you become narrow.
So you can probably understand now: Peter and Rob, in certain periods they were in a counterpart relationship -- for example, in the first century AD, during the Roman era, the two of them were in a counterpart relationship; in this lifetime, the two of them are not in a counterpart relationship. So Seth said, the two of them are both counterparts and not counterparts -- it depends on how you look at it and how you say it. From the spiritual perspective, they once were; from the physical perspective, the material-body perspective, in this lifetime they are not. But the two of them do share a common psychic memory, and this is more complex than we think.
So this spiritual knowledge, we must understand it thoroughly, and we must never feel that we already understand it all, that we have fully grasped it -- it is actually still more complex than we imagine.
Note 5
He was beginning his own Sumari development in the 1971 ESP class, and on the following evening, Seth began discussing that psychic event in Session 598. In one account, he said very humorously,
Sumari are the ones who want others to look after what they have created, and they will not stay around to pick up the grass.
What kind of personality is Sumari? Once they have created something, they do not bother with it anymore. It is like some people who, after mowing the lawn, do not clean up. He said the characteristic of Sumari is that they are creative but impatient; they are only responsible for creating, not for managing. They need others to take care of it, they need others to look after it.
注释与核实
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According to Mike's original words, "Love knows not whence it arises, yet it grows deep as it goes."; upon verification, it should be "The original line from the inscription of Tang Xianzu's The Peony Pavilion is 'Love, once begun, knows not whence it comes, yet it deepens as it goes.'" (Source: Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and National Supervisory Commission website, "Daily Character: Wang — Though there be a thousand or ten thousand men, I will go," https://m.ccdi.gov.cn/content/be/9b/24972.html) ↩
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Source: Newzoo, "Global games market to hit $189 billion in 2025 as growth shifts to console" (https://newzoo.com/articles/global-games-market-189-billion-2025) ↩
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This claim could not be verified. ↩