“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your ears certainly seem to be permanent appendages, and so do your eyes. You say: “My eyes are blue,” or “My ears are small.” The physical matter of those sense organs changes constantly, however, with you none the wiser. While your body appears quite dependable, solid, [and] steady, you are not aware of the constant interchanges that occur between it and the physical environment. It does not bother you one whit that the physical substance of your body is made up of completely different atoms and molecules than it was composed of seven years ago, [say], or that your familiar hands are actually innocent of any smallest smidgen of matter that composed them [even in recent times past].

(As he had during the 801st session, our cat, Billy, roused himself from a snooze and walked over to Jane. This time he jumped up into her lap, then positioned himself with his forelegs against her chest while examining her face. Jane, as Seth, petted him. I called Billy to me. He perched briefly on my own lap, then curled up on the cushion beside me.

You perceive the atoms’ activity in that fashion. [Nevertheless] the agreement takes place at mental levels, and is never completely “set,” though it appears to be. No one perceives the same chair [all of the time], though perhaps a given chair will seem to be “the same one” seen from different angles.

The “victims” choose to participate in those conditions at spiritual, psychological, and biological levels. Many of those who are counted among the fatalities might otherwise die of extended illnesses, for example. At cellular levels such knowledge is available, and in one way or another imparted, often in dreams, to the individual. Conscious comprehension need not follow, for many people know such things, and pretend not to know them at the same time.

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.”

Those people were aware just beneath consciousness of the possibilities of such an event long before the disaster occurred, and could until the last moment choose to avoid the encounter. Animals know of weather conditions ahead of time, as old tales say. This perception is a biological part of your heritage also. The body is prepared, though consciously it seems you are ignorant.

What grandiose claims these are, however — at least at this time — for Jane and I also read that in the last three-quarters of a century science has managed to bring about an increase of only four years in the life expectancy of the adult white male: from 69 to 73 years. Granted that the medical establishment has learned a lot since 1900, still it’ll have to move awfully fast now to make all of those predictions come true before the year 2000, say.

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.