“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now if you believe in one life only, then such conditions will seem most disastrous, and in your terms they clearly are not pretty. Yet, though each victim in an epidemic may die his or her own death, that death becomes part of a mass social protest. The lives of intimate survivors are shaken, and according to the extent of the epidemic the various elements of social life itself are disturbed, altered, rearranged. Sometimes such epidemics are eventually responsible for the overthrow of governments, the loss of wars.

The sight of the dying gave them visions of the meaning of life, and stirred new [ideas] of sociological, political, and spiritual natures, so that in your terms the dead did not die in vain. Epidemics by their public nature speak of public problems — problems that sociologically threaten to sweep the individual to psychic disaster as the physical materialization does biologically.

(Pause.) There has been great discussion in past years about the survival of the fittest, in Darwinian terms,⁴ but little emphasis is placed upon the quality of life, or of survival itself; or in human terms, [there has been] little probing into the question of what makes life worthwhile. Quite simply, if life is not worthwhile (louder), no species will have a reason to continue.

New paragraph: Despite all “realistic” pragmatic tales to the contrary, the natural state of life itself is one of joy, acquiescence with itself — a state in which action is effective, and the power to act is a natural right. You would see this quite clearly with plants, animals, and all other life if you were not so blinded by beliefs to the contrary. You would feel it in the activity of your bodies, in which the vital individual affirmation of your cells brings about the mass, immensely complicated achievement of your physical being. That activity naturally promotes health and vitality.

This book will be devoted, then, to those conditions that best promote spiritual, psychic, and physical zest, the biological and psychic components that make a species desire to continue its kind. Such aspects promote the cooperation of all kinds of life on all levels with one another. No species competes with another, but cooperates to form an environment in which all kinds can creatively exist.

The quality of life is important above all. Newborn animals either die quickly and naturally, painlessly, before their consciousnesses are fully focused here, or are killed by their mothers — not because they are weak or unfit to survive, but because the [physical] conditions are not those that will produce the quality of life that makes survival “worthwhile.”

There are also “trial runs” in human and animal species alike, in which peeks are taken, or glimpses, of physical life, and that is all. Epidemics sweeping through animal populations are also biological and psychic statements, then, in which each individual knows that only its own greatest fulfillment can satisfy the quality of life on an individual basis, and thus contribute to the mass survival of the species.

(Pause at 11:55.) Suffering is not necessarily good for the soul at all, and left alone natural creatures do not seek it. There is a natural compassion, a biological knowledge, so that the mother of an animal knows whether or not existing conditions will support the new offspring. Animals instinctively realize their relationship with the great forces of life. They will instinctively starve an offspring while its consciousness is still unfocused, rather than send it loose under adverse conditions.

An animal can indeed commit suicide. So can a race or a species. The dignity of a spirited life demands that a certain quality of experience be maintained.

1. In ordinary terms, various kinds of plague, including the bubonic and the infamous “Black Death,” were (and still are) spread to man by fleas carrying a bacterium from infected rats. Other forms of the affliction are carried by other rodents. In Seth’s terms, through the complicated interactions and communications involving all forms of life, man’s deep dissatisfactions would have periodically helped trigger the resurgence of scourges like the plagues: In 3rd-century Rome, for instance, several thousand people were said to have died each day; estimates are that over a 20-year period in the 14th century, three-quarters of the population of Europe and Asia perished; there was the great plague of London in 1665, and so forth.