“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Our friend, David Yoder [I’ll call him], is 48 years old. He’s a bachelor, and a high-school teacher. Jane and I met him in May 1960, when we moved from Sayre into an apartment house close to downtown Elmira. The house had once been a luxurious private home. Jane began the sessions there three years later; indeed, we were to stay there for 15 years. At first David lived across the hall from us on the second floor. Eventually he moved downstairs when a larger apartment right beneath ours became available: Still later, Jane and I rented the apartment he’d had on the second floor, so that we ended up with two apartments, side by side; we needed more room by then, and didn’t want to move.

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.

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.

I spoke about the quality of life, and it is true to say that in at least many centuries past, if men and women may have died earlier, they also lived lives of fuller, more satisfying quality—and I do not want to be misinterpreted in that direction.