“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

And do not judge according to your egotistical ideas alone. I am speaking to you now since you have set yourself (Brad) some problems. It took courage to set yourself the particular problems that you did for this existence, otherwise you would have tackled so many at one time, so to speak. There were certain truths that you found difficult to face. Now when I say this, I do not mean that the truths were difficult. I merely mean that in past lives there were certain portions of reality in which you did not have experience. And in this life you decided to experience these. And you are so doing and you are working toward solutions. If you knew this and if you knew what the problems were at this point, the problems would not be as real and the solutions would not be as valid. It would be like cheating in an examination.

Now. The interpretation is not quite correct. For one thing, this still involves you with problems from a past life. In the episode that we mentioned earlier, and the famine, you are afraid that you could not cope with physical reality. The particular life that we dealt with so briefly made an extremely strong psychic effect upon you for it was nearly impossible to cope, there was no food. At that point in your lifetimes you had no skills. You were not equipped, because of your background, to cope with hard reality. Many others were in the same condition. But it left you, that life, with the feeling that physical reality was so difficult that you could not handle it alone. You resolved, therefore, to store up what food you had in terms of fat and protein to hold you against times of famine.

Consciously you knew this was a rich country in your present life, but unconsciously you held to these old feelings of fear. Now these old feelings also hung over you in that you felt that existence was much more difficult than it actually is now, and you are still relating to this old existence where times were so difficult. Now in that time, you definitely needed—and you had—someone to help you. In that life, in that life of which I am speaking—you had a man, roughly resembling your wife in bone structure, and in temperament. This man was not a family relationship...was not in a family relationship. He befriended you; you depended upon him. You have projected this upon your wife. The man was the kind who gained feelings of superiority and pleasure from helping you, but also helped you quite legitimately and kindly. When you found this sort of a woman in this life, for your own reasons, you were attracted to her. Now she, for quite other reasons, was attracted to you, but you have been terrified that alone you could not make it and would not survive.