“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Let my soul find shelter elsewhere,” Jane said, by way of a quick translation when I played the tape for her a few minutes later. It was midafternoon on a cold day. She sat bundled up in her chair in the living room, her head down as she listened. I asked her for more on the song’s interpretation, but she just repeated that line. She roused herself enough to stubbornly maintain that she’d give me more later. I knew at once that the tape’s contents were so revealing of her feelings about her illness, so disturbing and frightening, that she couldn’t bring herself to explore those deep emotions at that time. I also knew that my wife feared the effect of the message upon me—for what could the phrase she’d already given me mean, except that her soul had at least considered the possibility of leaving her physical body, perhaps to find shelter in a nonphysical realm? I accepted her reactions, and could only wait in some frustration as I began work on other parts of this essay.

We do not just receive the torch of life and pass it on as one Olympic runner does to another, but we each add to that living torch or flame a power, a meaning, a quality that is uniquely our own. We do this as individuals, as members of the family, the community, and members of the species. Whenever that flame shows signs of dimming, of losing rather than gaining potential energy and desire, then danger signals appear everywhere. They show up as wars and social disorders on national scales, and as household crises, as illnesses (pause), as calamities on personal levels as well.

(7:35.) As I write this Introduction I am recovering from a group of illnesses, recuperating from a month’s stay in the hospital, and now I’m trying to see where my personal situation fits into Seth’s larger views. That is, the individual is not just a side issue in what people usually call the evolutionary process—but he or she is the entire issue, without which there would be no species, no survival, no exquisite web of genetic cooperation to produce living creatures of any kind whatsoever.

(8:21.) In this book, Seth does discuss to some degree the nature of certain illnesses as they apply to individual life and genetic survival. And there I lay in the hospital for a full month, with physical survival uppermost in my mind—hardly a coincidence. They told me that my thyroid gland was very underactive, and that I had arthritis. They X-rayed my hands but not my knees. One of the blood tests showed that I was slightly anemic. But other tests and X-rays revealed that I had sound lungs—in spite of my smoking—a good heart and stomach and other organs. I laughed.