“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.

The differences in motion are so divergent that to you the chair, like your body, appears permanent. The atoms and molecules, like the children, enjoy their motion — solidly sketched in space from your perspective, however, with no “idea” that you consider that motion a chair, or so use it.

But nowhere do we see anything about any spiritual dilemmas that may be involved with all of this, or about the enormous social problems — challenges, to be sure — that could soon begin to manifest themselves if anything even approaching “eternal life” comes within the reach of numbers of people. Think of the legalities alone involved. (People might even have to change their marriage vows!) Science-fiction ideas abound. What about population control? What about those who want to live on, but can’t afford to? How will decisions be made about who receives the favored treatment and who doesn’t? Will families qualify, or just individuals? Geniuses or dolts? If the services necessary to extend life are free — paid for by the government, that is — will government decide that certain families simply cannot be allowed to have children, that they’ll be left to die out? In view of our present world challenges, it might even be said that there are already too many people in the world. And what about animals and other forms of life? Perhaps in their own collective wisdom the animals will look upon us as though we’ve altogether given up our powers of intuitive understanding.