“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A chair is a chair for your purposes. As Ruburt speaks for me he sits in one. As you read this book you most probably lounge on a chair or couch or bench — all quite sturdy and real. The atoms and molecules within those chairs and couches are quite alert, though you do not grant them the quality of life. When children play ring-around-the-rosy, they form living circles in the air. In that game they enjoy the motion of their bodies, but they do not identify with those swirling circles. The atoms and molecules that make up a chair play a different kind of ring-around-the-rosy, and are involved in constant motion, forming a certain pattern that you perceive as a chair.

You operate quite nicely politically, living in villages, townships, countries, states, and so forth, each with certain customs and local ordinances. These in no way affect the land itself. They are designations for practical purposes, and they imply organization of intent or affiliation at one level. They are political patterns, invisible but highly effective. There are, however, far more vigorous invisible mental patterns, into which the thoughts and feelings of mankind are organized — or, naturally, organize themselves.

There’s much irony involved in the whole idea of living indefinitely. If such a possibility is ever achieved, I think that on conscious levels the members of the species will come to fear the chance of accidental death more than anything else, and that this powerful concern may seriously circumscribe behavior. For who, knowing that for all practical purposes he or she is “immortal,” will want to risk that most precious gift of all — life — by doing anything that could rudely take it away? Even contact sports, let alone activities like air, sea, or space travel, or any dangerous occupation, could be abhorred. Disease of any kind, as well as aging itself, would have to be controlled absolutely.