“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Tonight, Seth suggested that “portions of this session can be appended to the book,” meaning Dreams, but I found it easier to offer most of his generalized material verbatim while eliminating his information on one of my dreams.)

Some in your society feel that the young are kept out of life’s mainstream also, denied purposeful work, their adolescence prolonged unnecessarily. As a consequence some young people die for the same reason: They believe that the state of youth is somehow dishonorable. They are cajoled, petted, treated like amusing pets sometimes, diverted with technology’s offerings but not allowed to use their energy. There were many unfortunate misuses of the old system of having a son follow in his father’s footsteps, yet the son at a young age was given meaningful work to do, and felt a part of life’s mainstream. He was needed.

(9:34.) The so-called youth culture, for all of its seeming (underlined) exaggerations of youth’s beauty and accomplishments, actually ended up putting down youth, for few could live up to that picture. Often, then, both the young and the old felt left out of your culture. Both share also the possibility of accelerated creative vitality—activity that the elder great artists, or the elder great statesmen, have always picked up and used to magnify their own abilities. There comes a time when the experiences of the person in the world click together and form a new clearer focus, provide a new psychological framework from which his or her greatest capacities can emerge to form a new synthesis. But in your society many people never reach that point—or those who do are not recognized for their achievements in the proper way, or for the proper reasons….

1. Shades of the great ages given for those patriarchs in the Bible! That was my first thought when Seth told us that in ancient times certain people had “lived for several centuries.” My second thought was to cut his statement out of this record entirely, so that Jane and I wouldn’t have to contend with it at all. Jane wasn’t upset by Seth’s remark, and I could appreciate the humorous aspects of my own initial reactions—yet in all of the years he’s been giving us material, Seth has never before made a reference to what seems like impossible longevities.

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).

In Genesis 11, the listing of Abraham’s ancestors begins after the Flood with the oldest son of Noah, Shem, living some 600 years. Generally, Abraham’s forebears didn’t live as long as Adam’s descendants had, although after Shem their ages still ranged from 148 years to 460. Abraham himself was “only” 175 years old at his death.

Second: “The Bible is a conglomeration of parables and stories, intermixed with some unclear memories of much earlier times. The Bible that you recognize—or that is recognized—is not the first, however, but was compiled from several earlier ones as man tried to look back, so to speak, recount his past and predict his future. Such Bibles existed, not written down but carried orally, as mentioned some time ago, by the Speakers. It was only much later that this information was written down, and by then of course much had been forgotten. This is apart from the fact of tampering, or downright misinformation, as various factions used the material for their own ends.”