“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:53.) Again, in our material on suffering (see the 895th session, for instance), I mentioned that illness serves purposes—that it has a face-saving quality in your society—so here I am speaking of the body’s own abilities. In that light, the senses do not fade. Age alone never brought about any loss of physical agility, or of mental ability, or of desire. Death must come to every living person, yet the time and the means are basically up to each individual. Meaningful work is important at any age. You cannot content the aged entirely with hobbies any more than you can the young, but meaningful work means work that also has the exuberance of play, and it is that playful quality that contains within itself great propensities of a healing and creative nature.

In your society age has almost been considered a dishonorable state. Beliefs about the dishonor of age often cause people to make the decision—sometimes quite consciously—to bring their own lives to an end before the so-called threshold is reached. Whenever, however, the species needs the accumulated experience of its own older members, that situation is almost instantly reversed and people live longer.

I checked several Bibles, a Biblical almanac, and a Biblical dictionary. But one has only to read Chapter 5 of Genesis to learn what great ages are given to Adam and nine of his descendants up to Noah, or the time of the Flood. Did Adam really live for 930 years, or Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, for 912? (Why isn’t Eve’s age given in the Bible?) Enoch, the fifth elder listed after Seth, lived for a mere 365 years, but sired Methuselah, who at 969 years is the oldest individual recorded in the Bible. Methuselah was the father of Lamech (777 years), who was the father of Noah (950 years).

First: “In those early days men and women did live to ages that would amaze you today—many living to be several hundred years old. This was indeed due to the fact that their knowledge was desperately needed, and their experience. They were held in veneration, and they cast their knowledge into songs and stories that were memorized throughout the years. Beside this, however, their energy was utilized in a different fashion than yours is: They alternated between the waking and dream states, and while asleep they did not age as quickly. Their bodily processes slowed. Although this was true, their dreaming mental processes did not slow down. There was a much greater communication in the dream state, so that some lessons were taught during dreams, while others were taught in the waking condition. There was a greater and greater body of knowledge to be transmitted as physical existence continued, for they did not transmit private knowledge only, but the entire body of knowledge that belonged to the group as a whole.”

[...] Your beliefs about age, like everything else, will form your experience, and your mass beliefs will affect your civilization. With the current concepts held by your society, men and women fear old age from the time of youth. If young adulthood is considered the epitome of life, blessedness, and success, then old age is viewed as the opposite — a time of failure and decay.

[...] They fear that their very age, or existence in time, has betrayed them. [...]

Now: You equate the color white with brilliant consciousness, good, and youth, and the color black with the unconscious, old age and death.

In this value system the black races are feared, as, basically, the aged are feared. [...]

(Pause at 11:15.) In many “native” cultures an individual is not considered in terms of his age at all, and the numbering of years is regarded as insignificant. In fact, a man may not know his age as you think of it. It would do you all good — young, middle-aged and old alike — to forget the number of your years, because in your culture so many beliefs are limiting in those ways. Youth is denied its wisdom and old age is denied its joy.

To pretend to ignore your age, to act young because you fear your age, is no answer. [...] A realization of this would allow you at any age to draw upon qualities and knowledge that “existed” in your past or “will exist” in your future. Your ages are probable [simultaneous].

[...] They have no beliefs in old age that automatically shut down their abilities; so left alone, while they do physically die as all creatures must in those terms, they do not deteriorate in the same way.

[...] In the same way your own conclusions about age become fact in your experience. [...]

[...] You may have one, two or three preferred characteristics that correlate with your ideas, for example, but your concepts about age leave you no such freedom; for at one time or another all of you, “if you are lucky” in your terms, will approach old age.

So at whatever age, a revelatory episode is difficult to relate to others. In older age, however, no one is interested, and yet it is here, as in adolescence, that the greatest creativity may emerge but go unrecognized. [...]

These people may be of any age. [...]

[...] Youth and old age both have their place, and within the framework of your race each play important roles.

(To Rachel after break:) Now, your husband had a horror of old age. [...] He was particularly frightened at the idea of living to an old age. He feared mental disability in old age. [...] Now in the two lives immediately previous he stayed with the body at one time until he was 87 and at another to the age of 92 and at a time when such age was quite unusual. [...]

[...] The two of you, together in three lives, lived together until old age. [...]

Time perception is your own, including the instruments that test the age of the rock. [...]

[...] The situation triggered many fears, about you and Ruburt being alone, your age, the age of your brothers, who would come to your aid, or Ruburt’s. If necessary, Leonard at least had a knowledge of the medical world, while you and Ruburt do not. [...]

[...] The pendulum told me my situation was related to the fact that I stopped painting early, the windows, my worries about Jane, my age—the whole bit, in other words, so that I ended up thinking I’d accomplished precious little over the years. [...]

[...] I do want to emphasize that in many, many civilizations men were expected to improve almost all of their abilities with age, as per for example Bill Gallagher’s story of the old Indian who taught the young boys how to track animals in the forest. [...]

Men have always grown old—and women too (amused)—but they often displayed far greater wisdom, health, and even vitality in old age because it was expected of them, and because they expected it of themselves. [...]

[...] It is taken for granted that all mental, physical, spiritual and emotional satisfactions become lesser with advancing age. [...] It is often considered scandalous to even imagine sexual activity after the age of even 40 or 50.

Knowledge through experience is not considered a practical-enough method of learning, so that the skills and understanding that come with age are seldom taken into consideration.

There are very definite, excellent side-effects of growing older, that we will also discuss in this book — but here I want to assure the reader that basically speaking there are no diseases brought about by old age alone (intently).

[...] Its expression may be impeded at any time, but the unique energy of each individual is not drained away because of age alone.

(Age 3…Greenwich, Connecticut, very strong… GM initials here, someone you knew in the past.. [...] See the child Lisa until the age of 23. I see a marriage for her between the age of 23 & 24. [...]

(AGE 3—accident in long narrow kitchen. [...]

(This led rather naturally into a discussion of ages. [...] This is the first time he has given me any specific age, although in several previous sessions, among them the 149th and the 217th, he has mentioned my living to an old age. [...]

[...] I should add here that the 105th session dealt with the death of Jane’s mother, as well as Jane living to an advanced age. [...]

[...] The grandfather had also died at the age of 67. [...]

(Seth also agreed with me concerning my memory of earlier sessions in which he stated she would live to old age. [...]

There are many of these, dealing particularly with age also. Many people believe fervently that with approaching age they will meet a steady, disastrous deterioration in which the senses and the mind will be dull, and the body, stricken with disease, will lose all of its vigor and agility. [...]

The mind grows wiser with age when it is allowed to do so. There is even an acceleration of thought and inspiration, much like that experienced in the adolescent years, that suddenly brings a new understanding to the aged individual, and provides an impetus that should help the person to achieve greater comprehension — a comprehension that should quell all fears of death.

[...] There is no contradiction in a dream if you and your father are approximately the same age, for example. From my understanding of it, there was no other significance to the age orientation, except that the two of you were adults, and thus would have had a long shared background behind you. [...]

[...] In it, my father and I were about the same age.”)

[...] I’d wanted Seth to say something more specific about my being the same age [as a woman] as my father in the dream.)

[...] I dreamed that I was a woman of indeterminate age, perhaps around 50, and that in some way I was trying to improve, or wanted others to improve with me. [...] My father was in the dream with me as I knew him in “real” life, and oddly enough he was about the same age as I was in the dream. [...]

[...] There is not, for example, one particular physical object that deteriorates with age. [...] This appearance appears, that is, this physical object appears to change and to age, but the material does neither. [...] The ability of the individual creator of any particular physical form to use psychic energy to control and manipulate causes the outer appearance of deterioration and aging of matter.

Matter itself does not age or deteriorate. [...] I will also prove it even in so far as the so-called aging of rock formations and other archeological events are concerned. [...]

Again, no particular material object exists long enough, as an indivisible or rigid or identical thing, to change or age. [...]

Matter then, is of itself no more continuous, no more given either to growth or age, than is, say, the color yellow.

There is considerable confusion, for that matter, as to the geological ages as they are understood. Such species existed in many of these ages. [...]

[...] In your terms of history, man appeared in several different stages, or ages is a better word. [...]

[...] They did not need long periods of protection as infants, but in an animal fashion were physically more agile at younger ages than, say, the human infant.

[...] Modern man, then, existed with other manlike species, and appeared in many different places on the earth, and at different ages.

[...] Accepting your integrity in time allows the body to function until its natural end, in good condition, free from those distorted, invisible concepts about age. If you believe that youth is the ideal and struggle for it while simultaneously believing that old age must involve infirmities, then you cause an unnecessary dilemma, and hasten aging according to the negative aspects of your mind.

[...] (Long pause.) If you are over forty, for instance, you may tell yourself that age is meaningless, that you enjoy much younger people, that you think young thoughts. [...]

You will inhibit any thoughts of death or dying, or of old age, and so close out quite natural feelings that are meant to lead you beyond your earlier years. [...]

If you desperately try to remain young, it is usually to hide your own beliefs about age, and to negate all of those emotions connected with it. [...]

(I told Jane that I came up with the idea—hardly original thinking, I said—that we never die even as physical creatures, until we reach a ripe old age in some probable reality. That even though we may die in childhood, and at successive later ages, each of us lives to old age somewhere. [...]

(“What did you think of my speculations about life and age, births and probabilities?”)

[...] I planned to look up the ages of some Biblical patriarchs, and wanted to know what Jane might have been taught about such people, and their ages.

In those early days men and women did live to ages that would amaze you today — many living to be several hundred years old.

[...] They alternated between the waking and dream states (long pause), and while asleep they did not age as quickly. [...]

[...] Imagine that at age 13, three strong energy centers come to the surface of the personality — highly charged, so that one person cannot adequately fulfill the desires or abilities presented. You may have a three-way split at age 13. At [age] 40, each of the three selves may recognize age 13 as a turning point, and wonder what might have happened had they chosen other courses.

[...] An offshoot probable self might leave your reality at age 13, say, but could intersect with you again at age 30 for a variety of reasons — where to you, you suddenly change a profession, or become aware of a talent you thought you had forgotten, and find yourself developing it with amazing ease.

(In the last session, Seth began discussing separate photographs of Jane and me [taken at the ages of 12 and 2, respectively] in connection with his ideas about probable selves. [...]

[...] Your mother had him defiantly, after the usual childbirth age (she was 36) almost reacting against that [probable] hysterectomy. [...]

(“Are we correct in thinking you indicated the age 33?”)

(“What was your age at the time of your death?”)

(“And the age of your wife at the time of her death?”)

(“What is Patricia’s age?”)

He battles his beliefs about age, yet he is frightened that with age comes complacency, stagnation. [...]

Dissertation: taxes, indulgence, age, and beliefs—that is the headline (with amusement). [...]

[...] As he reached 50, his beliefs about age rose to the forefront. [...]

[...] For Frank was not complacent, but feared that age would make him so—hence a conflict. [...]