“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause.) Natural disasters represent an understandably prejudiced concept, in which the vast creative and rejuvenating elements important to planetary life, and therefore to mankind, are ignored. The stability of the planet rests upon such changes and alterations, even as the body’s stability is dependent upon, say, the birth and death of the cells.

(10:20.) It is quite obvious that people must die — not only because otherwise you would overpopulate your world into extinction, but because the nature of consciousness requires new experience, challenge, and accomplishment. This is everywhere apparent in nature itself. (Pause.) If there were no death, you would have to invent it (smile) — for the context of that selfhood would be as limited as the experience of a great sculptor given but one hunk of stone (with quiet dramatic emphasis).¹

Each person’s thoughts flow into that formation, forming part of the earth’s psychic atmosphere. From that atmosphere flows the natural earthly patterns from which your seasons emerge with all of their variety and effects. You are never victims of natural disasters, though it may seem that you are, for you have your hand in forming them. You are creatively involved in the earth’s cycles. No one can be born for you, or die for you, and yet no birth or death is really an isolated event, but one in which the entire planet participates. In personal terms, again, each species is concerned not only with survival but with the quality of its life and experience.

(11:44.) Others have finished with their challenges; they want to die and are looking for an excuse — a face-saving device. However, those who choose such deaths want to die in terms of drama, in the middle of their activities, and are in a strange way filled with the exultant inner knowledge of life’s strength even at the point of death. At the last they identify with the power of nature that seemingly destroyed them.

That identification often brings about in death — but not always — an added acceleration of consciousness, and involves such individuals in a kind of “group death experience,” where all of the victims more or less embark into another level of reality “at the same time.”

Right now I’d bet that man will most certainly try with all of his might every technique he can devise in order to prolong physical life as long as possible — so great is his conscious fear of death as the consummate extinction for all time to come. Through all of his recorded history, man has created that fear, that belief, with the greatest tenacity imaginable.

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.

As for Jane and me, we really don’t think it necessary that we live forever physically, or even to be 200 years old — an attitude that may be no more than a sign of our own conditioning. We may even be a little sad and jealous that we chose to be born a few decades too soon. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the age of 100, though, if I were in good shape,” Jane said as we discussed this note. Those of approaching generations, we thought, may have no hesitation at all about opting to live as long as possible. At least for a while, consciousness would accommodate them very well. The final irony of all may develop, however: Jane added that the suicide rate would rise considerably after the many implications associated with extended lifetimes began to penetrate human consciousness. People, she said, at last openly recognizing the great necessity and desirability of biological death, would in many instances simply “turn themselves off.”