“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

David is one of the kindest people we’ve ever known. Jane initiated her ESP classes late in 1967—so each Tuesday night for the next seven and a half years, our friend put up with a vast amount of shouting and banging over his head. He knew what Jane was up to, but had only a peripheral interest in “psychic phenomena.” David never complained about the racket, though sometimes he secluded himself in a back room down there, or left the house until class was over. It seemed that we were always apologizing for bothering him.

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.

During the last couple of weeks David hadn’t made his regular trips up the hill, but Jane and I were so busy that that fact nearly escaped us. Last Thursday morning, then, we were really shocked when Doris, who is also a teacher and a friend from those apartment-house years, called to tell us that David was in the hospital—that he was to undergo triple-bypass heart surgery the next day. Jane and I couldn’t believe it. We’d thought David was in excellent health. He’d taken up jogging some time ago and was now running 15 miles at a time, three days a week. As he lay in the hospital, David asked Doris why this was happening to him, when he’d tried to take care of himself, help others, and “do everything right.”

David is recovering well from his surgery now, but cannot have visitors yet. Jane has called the hospital each day to ask about him; she’s putting together for him a unique, evocative little book of poetry and paintings. I’m running errands for David, and eventually will be taking him home from the hospital.

Seth talked about illness and suffering in general this evening, and about David in particular. I’m presenting excerpts from the generalized part of his material, but none about David himself. We have no idea of pressing Seth’s personal information upon David; doing that would be an invasion of his privacy. Tonight’s material, however, adds to our understanding of subjects like free will and choosing, good and evil, sickness and health, and reflects upon many questions people have asked us over the years.

“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 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.

(Pause at 9:50.) There are obviously some conditions that in your terms are inherited, showing themselves almost instantly after birth, but these are of a very limited number in proportion to those diseases you believe are hereditary—many cancers, heart problems, arthritic or rheumatoid disorders. And in many cases of inherited difficulties, changes could be effected for the better, through the utilization of other mental methods that we will certainly get to someday.

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.

In that framework, even the emotions of love and exaltation are seen as no more than the erratic activity of neurons firing (pause), or of chemicals reacting to chemicals. Those beliefs alone bring on suffering. All of science, in your time, has been set up to promote beliefs that run in direct contradiction to the knowledge of man’s heart. Science has, you have noted, denied emotional truth. It is not simply that science denies the validity of emotional experience, but that it has believed so firmly that knowledge can only be acquired from the outside, from observing the exterior of nature.

One man might use it to achieve success. One might use it to achieve failure. A person might use it as a means of showing pride or humility, of looking for attention or escaping it. Illness is often another mode of expression, but nowhere does science mention that illness might have its purpose, or its groups of purposes, and I do not mean that the purposes themselves are necessarily derogatory. Illnesses are often misguided attempts to attain something the person thinks important. [Sickness] can be a badge of honor or dishonor—but there can be no question, when you look at the human picture, that to a certain extent, but an important one, suffering not only has its purposes and uses, but is actively sought for one reason or another.

Most people do not seek out suffering’s extreme experience, but within those extremes there are multitudinous degrees of stimuli that could be considered painful, that are actively sought. Man’s involvement in sports is an instant example, of course, where society’s rewards and the promise of spectacular bodily achievement lead athletes into activities that would be considered most painful by the ordinary individual. People climb mountains, willingly undergoing a good bit of suffering in the pursuit of such goals.

I do not want any of this to appear too simplistic, but we must begin somewhere in this kind of discussion…. This is far from the entire story [of illness], but it is enough for this evening’s saga. When you can, encourage your fine wife to follow your example in determining not to worry. It should be the first commandment.

“You didn’t seem to want to take one.” But also, I’d become so interested in the session that I forgot everything else. My right hand was tired now, though.

“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….”

1. Seth certainly touched upon a question that’s loaded with ethical and legal dilemmas; many of these have grown out of recent scientific advances in genetics. Some moral philosophers, medical geneticists, physicians, lawyers, and religious leaders believe that those who carry genes for serious genetic diseases do not have the right to reproduce. Others of similar background maintain just the opposite—that the right to recreate one’s kind is inalienable. Questions abound involving amniocentesis (examination of the fluid in the womb to detect genetic defects in the fetus); therapeutic abortion; artificial insemination; reproduction by in vitro fertilization; embryo transfer (surrogate motherhood); the responsibilities of the legal, medical and religious communities; whether mentally retarded, genetically defective people should receive life-prolonging medical treatment, and so forth. Years are expected to pass before our legal system alone catches up with the scientific progress in genetics—but, ironically, continuing advances in the field are bound to complicate even further the whole series of questions.