“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I am being maligned. I have spoken to our Lady of Florence over here many times and you could have explained to our new student what I mean. I should be quiet and let you do so. You do indeed choose your own environment and your own life circumstances. And before this life you have already set those challenges that you will meet. But you also are endowed with free will and there is no punishment except [for] those of you who choose to punish yourselves. There is no punishment in those terms. You grow in understanding, and if you kill, then it is necessary that you learn what it means to be a victim and so you become a victim if you choose. You may indeed learn what it is to be a victim in other ways. You must learn how to use the consciousness that is yourself.

You have a different form every seven years. The atoms and molecules of your body have completely changed. There is not one small vestige within your physical body at this moment that was within it eight years ago. Your forms are completely new and different, and yet I see that you carry on quite effectively and it does not seem to bother you. Look at your friend over here (Doug). It does not bother him. And so if you change your physical form without knowing it as the years go by, why should it surprise you that at one time you leave the present form that you call your own for another. For if I am speaking through the body of a woman, so have the three men here present spoken through the bodies of women when those bodies were their own, and the women spoke as men.

There is no road to truth. No one road where the answers appear like road signs and you have only to follow. The road to truth is no road, it is a series of steps within yourselves; ever miraculous and ever new.

Now I do not want to monopolize your conversation and so I will let you take a break and when you are ready for new material I will give it to you.

I can imagine a lovely scene where bodiless individuals, spiritual psychologists and I, sit in a dark room all dressed in gowns at another level of reality, and they ask me what is wrong with me and I say—I am obsessed. I have it in my head that there is a physical reality somewhere where objects have shape and form—where there are things like trees and people and streetcars and a strange thing called progress. And where people believe in things like ghosts and demons all on the same line, seeing little difference between them and I imagine in my most schizoid (Doug—“that’s what I said”) moments that there is a woman called Jane Butts in a strange, funny little town in a completely fantastic place called Elmira, New York. And I have the delusion that I speak through this woman and look out through her eyes at the most fantastic creatures imaginable.

It would be easy for me to give you a set of rules. Some of you would be only too glad to follow them for you would not have to face your own responsibility and your own responsibility is to look within and to use your own abilities. For you, each of you, will develop in your own way through endless eons in your terms. You think that an atom is beneath you or a flower. You have 500 times as far to go. You will develop in ways you cannot now understand and you develop as you unfold, as you use your abilities. You will find your own road. You will even make your own truths. For you are expected to make new ones. Truths are not trees that you discover in the forest. They spring up ever new. All That Is is not static or it would be dead; it is ever changing as you are.

([Gert:] “Now when you say that about creativity.... What then about planned parenthood? The use of contraceptives to deliberately prohibit a new life?”)

Now this situation did not simply arise. You brought it upon yourselves to teach yourselves a lesson. You brought it upon yourselves to bring yourselves to a new step of spiritual and psychic evolution. You had to realize that a certain amount of spirituality was necessary if the inner psychic self would grow. You brought it upon yourselves so you would realize that you were blessed with a planet upon which your species could grow. You brought it upon yourselves so that you would realize despite all your stories (shouts really loud!) that you have not been given domination.

You will learn that it is cruel to bring into existence new consciousness when your planet cannot support it. For your planet will not be able to support it and spiritual growth cannot be achieved through starving bodies nor through the agonies of mothers who must watch their children starve. (Nigerian civil war at this time.)