“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In March 1975 Jane and I purchased the hill house just outside Elmira, and within a few weeks David acquired his own place not far from us in the valley below. We didn’t see each other as often as we used to, but one morning each week, on his way to school, David left his magazines and newspapers at our back porch door, whether or not we were up, or saw him.

Each time someone we know gets in serious trouble, Jane and I start questioning anew our own values, and those of the society we live in, for such challenges seem to come unbidden and unwanted from way out in some far corner of each person’s reality. We also had in mind another friend who’d died of cancer last year at the age of 39.

“Well,” Jane said as we sat for the session, “I’d almost rather feel that you were the victim of blind chance or accident, rather than that you get sick because of your own dumb ignorance or choice….” When I remarked that I tried not to worry about such things anymore, she replied that she too had better get back to book work and forget the world’s troubles: “Come on, Seth, I’m here.” But even as she felt him around, she knew that Seth wouldn’t be giving book dictation per se.)

The church’s view of reality was the accepted one. I cannot stress too thoroughly the fact that the beliefs of those times structured individual human living, so that the most private events of personal lives were interpreted to mean thus and so, as were of course the events of nations, plants, and animals. The world’s view was a religious one, specified by the church, and its word was truth and fact at the same time.

It is easy enough to look at those belief structures and shrug your shoulders, wondering at man’s distorted views of reality. The entire scientific view of illness, however, is quite as distorted (with amused emphasis). It is as laboriously conceived and interwound with “nonsense.” It is about as factual as the “fact” that God sends illness as punishment, or that illness is the unwanted gift of mischievous demons.

The scientific framework is basically, now, just as senseless, though within it the facts often seem to prove themselves out, also. There are viruses, for example. Your beliefs become self-evident realities. It would be impossible to discuss human suffering without taking that into consideration. Ideas are transmitted from generation to generation—and those ideas are the carriers of all of your reality, its joys and its agonies. Science, however, is all in all (underlined) a poor healer. The church’s concepts at least gave suffering a kind of dignity: It did (underlined) come from God—an unwelcome gift, perhaps—but after all it was punishment handed out from a firm father for a child’s own good.

There are as many kinds of suffering as there are kinds of joy, and there is no one simple answer that can be given. As human creatures you accept the conditions of life. You create from those conditions the experiences of your days. You are born into belief systems as you are born into physical centuries, and part of the entire picture is the freedom of interpreting the experiences of life in multitudinous fashions (all intently). The meaning, nature, dignity or shame of suffering will be interpreted according to your systems of belief. I hope to give you along the way a picture of reality that puts suffering in its proper perspective, but it is a most difficult subject to cover because it touches most deeply upon your hopes for yourselves and for mankind, and your fears for yourselves and for mankind.

Give us a moment…. You have taught yourselves to be aware of and to follow only certain portions of your own consciousnesses, so that mentally you consider certain subjects taboo. Thoughts of death and suffering are among those. In a species geared above all to the survival of the fittest, and the competition among species, then any touch of suffering or pain, or thoughts of death, become dishonorable, biologically shameful, cowardly, nearly insane. Life is to be pursued at all costs—not because it is innately meaningful, but because it is the only game going, and it is a game of chance at best. One life is all you have, and that one is everywhere beset by the threat of illness, disaster, and war—and if you escape such drastic circumstances, then you are still left with a life that is the result of no more than lifeless elements briefly coming into a consciousness and vitality that is bound to end.

“I don’t remember much of that,” Jane said, “but I’ve got the feeling that Seth meant the material to defuse some of my own thoughts lately—that there isn’t any answer for all of the pain and suffering in the world—that the whole thing is so vast that you can’t say or do anything that will be of much use to anyone….”