Sumari Come Home

"The season had slipped into November's drear that Tuesday, the 23rd; about a dozen people had showed up, and we were laughing and talking as usual. The heat was banging up through the apartment's old steam radiators; a chill wet wind was rattling the windows. Jane talked about her father, Delmer, and his wild, brawling life. Arnold briefly mentioned his father's passing. Gert Barber told some more anecdotes about life in a convent. Vanessa, who attended class at that time with her sister Valerie, passed out copies of a local college newspaper, in which she'd published an article on Jane and ESP. Class seemed quiet enough—in fact, a couple of people said they were feeling downright sleepy. I had the vague impression that Jane's attention was focused elsewhere, but attributed it to her father's death. Part of me wondered, in dismay, if we'd end up exploring the ramifications of grief that night—something that in those days would have made me extremely embarrassed.
At 9:30, Jane called a break. Several of us got in line for the john or wandered into the little kitchen to yak. Bette Zahorian sat in her chair, looking glum. I smiled at her, but at that precise moment, my inner antennae perked up. Something was going on, something was whispering right beneath the familiar motions we were going through; right beneath the words and sentences and in the curve of our elbows and knees and lips. Objects in the room were suddenly bright and clear; as I looked, it seemed that each thing's color became more brilliant, more itself, more—real. Super-real. I watched Jane as she came back from the rooms across the hallway and sat down in her rocking chair. She was facing the bay windows from the other side of the big, barnlike room, made so cozy by the philodendron-tangled room divider that housed books, sculptures, pretty rocks, and a large black ashtray appropriately labeled, "BUTTS."
Jane adjusted her glasses and sat quietly, tapping the chair arm with her long fingernails (painted blue this evening)—a familiar gesture. "Break's over!" she called. Immediately, Gert and Sheila began to repeat for us their break conversation on "separate" or trance personalities. The conversation didn't get through to me somehow, but by then my own attention was elsewhere.
"I think there's a damn crowd of people in this room tonight," Bette stated; at nearly the same time, Jane said, "Wait a minute," in a soft voice. We waited. "I'm getting this hole-ripped-in-the-universe thing again," Jane said at last, referring to an expansion-of-consciousness experience she'd recently had during her Wednesday Creative Writing class. "I'm getting..." she paused, lowered her eyes, lightly tapped her fingers against her lips. "Oh, it's...well, it's like, it's... there's this hole ripped in the universe outside those windows, and it's like...like this group of people seem to be...uh, well, coming in, around the room...."
Jane's voice was quick and light, almost apologetic. Her eyes were wide and dark, as they are during Seth trances—but this was no Seth trance, by any means. You could see that she was really getting something—it was as though her small corporeal self were traveling faster than light, whirling through the fabric of space and out the other side, right there before our eyes. I thought of my peculiar impression of the "speed" of the Seth sessions, but something else was going on here; some event was really piling up. "I think—it's like their teacher, or whatever...is standing by the table in front of the windows..."Jane trailed off, caught up in it. We all sat still, waiting. I was on the floor in front of Jane's rocker. All the lights were on.
Abruptly, Jane Said, "Sue, hand me a pencil and paper, please." I grabbed some notebook sheets and a pen from Gert and gave them to Jane, who immediately started writing. "Well," she said after a moment, " I got this—uh, these words, from this group or whatever, I'm hearing this babble of stuff, uh, not English, and I think I'm supposed to say them, or something, Sue, and what the hell, and so I wrote them down, and they're—" her voice was suddenly loud and full—"and they're like this: SUMARI—ISPANIA—WENA NEFARIE—" each word was louder than the last, and Jane threw the paper to the floor, arched back in her chair, filled her lungs with a huge, ecstatic gasp, and literally screamed "DENA, DENA NEFARI, LONA LONA LONA, SU-U-U-U-U-MAR-R-R-R-I-I-I-I-I!!!"
The words wailed off the ceiling and echoed up and down the hallway outside. The hairs on my neck rose right up and tingled; tears stung my eyes, a sharp, white-hot thrill echoing through me just as that wail was ringing through the walls of the stately old three-story house. I was shocked and appalled and utterly transformed. And still today, writing this chapter or reading Jane's recollections, the memory of that chant brings an electric rush surging through me, tingling again in the roots of my scalp and the layers of my skin.
Jane was still arched in her chair, her eyes moving rapidly behind her closed lids. "Jane?" Sally Benson said, reaching over to touch her arm. "Jane, are you—"
At Sally's touch, Jane opened her eyes and sat forward, smiling around at each one of us. "It is with this always we begin, and we begin our classes," a soft, warm voice whispered. "It is with this chant always that we begin our endeavors in our space. It is not your own, and only a translation, for we do not use verbal communication. It is always with a facsimile of what we have heard that we begin our work, and in many guises and in many ways you are acquainted with our activities."
Jane's eyes were wide open, almost unblinking; the voice liquid and soft, like a spring night. I could sense, as Jane spoke these words, a great confusion of voices, or of people, buzzing somewhere just around the corner of my sight and hearing. To me, the room was packed; crowded beyond its physical capacity to hold us all—and indeed, reading this session over eight years later, I was surprised to recall that there were actually only thirteen of us there.
The warm voice went on: "We have always been here in your terms as you have always been in other places and other times, and there is a great familiarity and wonder on our part that you are still involved in these endeavors which were begun in your terms so many centuries ago, and in ways that you cannot now presently comprehend." Jane's later description for her feelings in trance was that "an astonishing graciousness" seemed to fill her. "Gracious" is certainly the attitude this voice fulfilled—as though we were all dear, precious, and living memories of a time and place nearly lost in the clouds of myth—almost as we might remember childhood stories about our ancestors.
"There are cities that we have built that you have helped build in other areas in your time," the voice said. "We have been here many times, and you have been where we are." Jane's eyes looked all around the room again, and suddenly she lifted up her head and wailed again, "Su-u-u-mar-r-r-r-i-i-i!"
With that, Jane began speaking in a deeper, ponderous voice. "And I am Sumari in another guise," it said. "And all of you have your guises and your masks that you wear and have worn. I am Sumari in another guise. And all of these guises are myself, and all of your guises are yourselves. And as I dwell in many realities, so dwell you in many realities."
My eyes were focused on Jane's face, but as this voice spoke of many realities, I became aware of two things simultaneously: a strong subjective feeling that I was vastly, incredibly ancient, and looking back fondly on a scene that centuries ago had turned to dust and bones; and secondly, that standing behind Jane's chair was a three-dimensional, quite solid golden figure, its head nearly reaching the ceiling. This figure stayed put even as I stared at it in mild surprise, though there were no details within its bulk. It was at this point, Jane later said, that she felt the personality characteristics of an old man and young boy at once—"an ancient boy," she says in Adventures—the ancient and the new, combined.
Again, the room seemed full, spinning with motion and light and sound at the periphery of perception. The gold-yellow figure faded, but in its place I kept getting strong mental images of tiers and tiers of dwellings, or of city-structures—waiting, it seemed to me, in a kind of "hold" position on the other side of space, building up enough energy to "burst" through.
Later, when class compared notes, we found that all of us had experienced some kind of altered focus of attention, including "visions" of groups of figures standing around the room. Rob, as it turned out (as Jane describes in Adventures), had also seen a vision—his of bright, jagged light, appearing as he sat typing in the apartment kitchen across the hallway, consciously unaware of what was going on in class.
"We are all Sumari...and you are all Sumari, and never forget that you are all Sumari, and have always been Sumari," the second, deeper voice was saying.
"Are there other family names?" Gert asked.
"It is the name of your family," the voice repeated. "It has always been the name of your family."
When the voice was finished speaking, it took Jane many long minutes to come out of trance—in itself unusual for her. By then it was past 11 o'clock, and time for class to end. We trailed out of the room, saying good-night to Jane, who stayed seated, answering us only vaguely, her attention still drawn in other directions.
The night was fiercely cold and damp. As I started down the street, I seemed to be stepping out of a session of dream-talk. "What was that all about?" I said to Vanessa and Valerie, who were getting in their car. I felt uncomfortable—yet triumphant, in some mysterious way. But this had been Jane's doing, of course; a new turn in Jane's development. Still, the next night, when I volunteered to record and type up the regular Seth session so Rob would be free to ask questions, Seth went on at great length about Sumari—not only as an important turn in Jane's abilities, but as a psychic alliance, or "family of consciousness" that existed "in all levels of activity... who come together for certain reasons, varying reasons; whose individual inclinations are somewhat the same...you may think of the guilds in the Middle Ages, for example," Seth told Rob. "It is a membership of choice, in other words; of attraction and respect, and usually this is bound by like purposes and endeavor. These are true families....
"Their main activities take place in other levels of consciousness. You are on missions, in certain terms. You do attend meetings, when you are in the sleep state [and] between lives. You work through many layers of reality at the same time. Now, these are the people, for example...the strangers that you see in your dreams. You are affecting each other's realities."
Seth went on to describe the Sumari "family" and its "strong psychic alliance and . . . the agility with which they can manipulate between systems, consciously, with purpose, and with some exuberance. They are given much more, for example, to ideas than to the various camouflage realities within systems.... Many groups, you see, deal exclusively with the camouflage reality between systems, with building it up, with its maintenance. [The Sumari] initiate the birth of systems. They constantly carry communications between systems, and they deal with the initiation and communication of ideas...
"The time, simply, was right for the [Sumari] information to come through," Seth said. "Two members [of class] had lost members of their own family. They were ready, therefore, to learn of their greater family...and you can be involved in this work only so long, you see, before you become acquainted with your true associates...You are being recognized, in your terms, as your present personalities, by your guild again. You are now ready to take up conscious membership. It is a way to acquaint your conscious self with your real and deep alliances." Seth added that while all those in class the night before were of this Sumari clan, as were others who came to Jane's class, there were other "families" of consciousness allied in their own particular endeavors.
After this first appearance, Jane's Sumari trances changed rapidly from week to week. In the following class, Jane explained some of Seth's information on the Sumari "family." "Seth made some crack about my 'dislike of brotherhoods, alive or dead,' " Jane laughed. "He said the Sumari were temperamentally suited to creative work but 'didn't like to hang around to mow the grass,' which is, I guess, a pretty good description."
Then, easily and smoothly, Jane slipped into trance, and the Sumari personality was there, wide-eyed and smiling, a certain softness about her face not lent to her by Seth's presence. This time, though, the words she used were not in English. At first, I thought she was speaking in French or Latin—or some version of the two mixed together. But it wasn't any language as we knew languages; it was language-like sound, rolling from Jane's lips with an odd eloquence, accompanied by lovely, graceful gestures.
"This soft, almost-inaudible voice of last week's personality came through Jane, talking seriously, pleadingly, and lovingly with Sue, Sally, and Florence in an altogether strange tongue," Faith Briggs recalls of that night. "At one time Jane absolutely conked the back of her neck on the straight-backed chair she was in, so Gert put a soft pillow behind her head....
"Jane went through all kinds of impersonations," Faith says, "like matching up characteristics of the present group of Sally and Florence with their age-old counterparts, singing lullaby-type songs, changing expression and tone and manner of voice, and ending up with this Su-u-u-mar-i-i-i! in a long drawn-out call. At one point I had goose bumps all over. Jane was trying so hard, in trance, to get the group [in front of her] to repeat and understand the words she was using. Like 'Old Home' week!"
The Sumari trance-person spoke to each one of us in this non-language. I tried for a few minutes to translate it word for word (a technique that doesn't work no matter what the language is); then I just relaxed and listened to the sound as you might listen to music. Sumari-Jane then gestured to me, pointed up the street in the direction of my apartment, and pantomimed a mother rocking her baby to sleep, all the while speaking in those tender, velvety word-sounds. It was sweet and obviously appropriate, but I found that I was simply not very comfortable with what was going on—its emotional expression was just too overt for me. And then, quite without warning, Sumari-Jane broke into song!
I'd heard Jane sing in her "own" voice, and I can vouch for the fact that she can't carry a tune very well at all. Although she loves all forms of music from rock to classical, she has no musical training (except Catholic school choir). But the Sumari songs combined many incredible facets of ability, including a vocal sophistication and range normally beyond her. "Jane, who had no knowledge or training as a singer, did what trained vocalists do," acknowledge Warren and Camille Atkinson, who are both musicians and music teachers.
Flowing from Jane with ease and joy, the Sumari songs were often interspersed with spoken Sumari, and displayed a psychological acuity as deft as Seth's—but without words. Her Sumari was like songs of the psyche; they captured an individual's inner "sound" and its relationship within the class. She might, for instance, sing in Sumari to two or three of us, using gestures, musical tones and rhythms, and a variety of voice ranges from a high soprano to a growling tenor, to express our own levels of interaction....

...I do think that the Sumari dramas were meant to lead us, through our emotions, into a knowing of our identities. The fact that Sumari-Jane spoke in music and non-language meant that you, the listener, had to feel an interpretation ("I cried and cried when I first heard Sumari," says Camille Atkinson) or tune out the whole event—which some members did, not liking the Sumari phenomenon at all ("Sumari was just so much noise to me," Harold Wiles recalls). I was caught somewhere in the middle of these reactions; yet beyond their psychological import, the Sumari songs and poetry were, simply, superb works of art. Warren transposed the Sumari "Song of Creation" and played it for us on his cello one week—surprising nobody more than Jane at the work's sophisticated beauty.
In Jane and Rob's private sessions, Seth gave extensive information on the nature of the language behind physical systems, and how Sumari was supposed to be leading us, through the quality of sound, away from the accepted structure of words and into the basic, multidimensional expression of being. "As I have often said, language is used as often to distort as it is to clearly communicate." Seth told Rob soon after the Sumari had appeared. "There is a structure within the Sumari language, but it is not one based upon logic. Some of its effectiveness has to do with the synchronization of its rhythms with bodily rhythm. The sounds themselves activate portions of the brain not ordinarily used in any conscious manner. It is a disciplined language in that spontaneity has a far greater degree of order than any of you recognize.
"The word Shambaline [for example], connotes the changing faces that the inner self adopts through its various experiences," Seth told Rob. "Now, this is a word that hints of relationships for which you have no word. Shambalina Garapharti [means] the changing faces of the soul smile and laugh at each other. Now all of that is in one phrase.
"By saying the words and opening your perception, the meaning becomes clear in a way that cannot be stated in verbal terms, using your recognizable but rigid language pattern; so we will be dealing then with the concepts as well as feelings, but seeking them through the use of a new method, and sometimes translating them back and forth for practice." And class being the testing ground that it was, Seth's explanations of Sumari were "tried out" in the strangest ways—beginning with the "Sumari Circle."
Seth had been speaking at length to us that December Tuesday about the inner doors that Sumari could open. "Each of you receives revelations every moment of your lives," he was saying. "Your life is a revelation. We are trying to lead you gently so that you will accept the revelations of your peers. Within you are answers and questions. The questions are to lead you to your own answers, and the answers will not be the same.
"The revelations have come through the centuries; the revelations are the centuries. The centuries are transparent. You can look through this history that you know. The selves that sit there know other selves. There are revelations within you that do not need words; they need to rise up like new planets into your consciousness, and you need to greet them gently and not give them labels or names.
"So we are leading you away from labels or names, and for awhile you may feel confused or lonely, for you only feel safe when you can name an experience; and you want to know, What is it? What is its name? Is the [Sumari] language a truth? Did it exist in the past—what is it?
"We want you to do away with the normal punctuation of your experience, for you put periods and question marks and dashes where they do not belong...the words are stepping-stones to lead you into other areas of experience. Within the word is a wordless knowledge. Now you need the sounds to remind you.
"In time—in your time—you will dispense with even the sounds. You will be walking backward, in your terms, into the heart of perception; therefore you will leave behind many of the truths that are now familiar to you, the words that you take for granted. For when you consider an experience, you apply words to it much more than feeling: does this word apply, or does that word apply, or what is it?—and without its label, dare I experience this unknown?"

Conversations With Seth
Copyrighted 1980 and 1997 by Susan M. Watkins.