“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth also discussed Jane’s persistent psychological abuse and mistreatment by her mother, Marie, over the years, and the young girl’s resultant deep fear of abandonment. Jane never lost that fear, and needed frequent reassurances that she was a worthy person. She’d seldom found that reinforcement while living with a parent who had been divorced and become bedridden by the time Jane was three years old, and who had a host of problems—challenges—of her own to meet.

“Each person seeks value fulfillment, and that means that they choose various lives in such a fashion that all of their abilities and capacities can be best developed, and in such a way that their world is also enriched. Some people will choose ‘defective’ bodies purposely in order to focus more intensely in other areas. They want a different kind of focus…. Such a choice demands an intensification. It is made on the part of the individual and on the parts of the parents as well….”

“I now want to put the sinful-self material in a larger spectrum,” Seth told us in part. “Ideally, infants ‘bond’ with their parents, particularly with the mother but with the father also, and they bond with the general ideas of their society. This offers the sense of safety in which the youngster can then feel free and curious enough to explore its world and the nature of reality.

“Now Ruburt had only one parent available most of the time, and he did not feel secure in that relationship—a situation chosen ahead of time, now. There is great leeway in the nature of such bondings…. With some people, they are so secure that they provide an overall, fairly permanent inner and outer framework. Ruburt’s relationship with his mother left much to be desired. The bonding did not secure him that vital sense of safety, and he felt threatened by abandonment. His bonding to the cultural beliefs of religion was very strong to make up for that initial lack. The sinful-self material represents those ideas that were a strong element in his original belief structures. The ‘troublesome’ material remained relatively inactive until his curiosity and ability led him to actively challenge those ideas while [he was] also in a situation where the natural fear of abandonment might be suggested. At certain points, the assimilation of new information is so qualifiedly different from the original belief structure that in order to assimilate it the personality is left for a time between belief systems.

“The point at which such a situation happens is of course internal, and it may or may not have anything to do with the quality of material, but with its nature. Each society—or each system of knowledge, for that matter—has its own taboos built in, and most of these imply abandonment by the community. A firm bonding with the parent ideally implies, however, that the child will not be abandoned, despite parental anger at any given time.

One can, of course, turn the whole thing around in various ways: The freshly dead person, still carrying his or her nonmaterial emotions, can feel a grief equal to that of the one left behind; their mutual sorrow can form a bond stronger, perhaps at least temporarily, than those created by either one in other lives with other people. Or the one still “alive” can turn away from the dead partner, relative, or friend in order to be psychically and physically free for new adventures. The variety of relationships between parents and children, no matter on which side the death occurs, must be vast. Jane said that perhaps we can get some answers from Seth.