“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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

Not one idea will be discovered residing in the brain cells. You can try to convey an idea, you can feel its effects, but you cannot see it as you can the chair. Only a fool would say that ideas were nonexistent, however, or deny their importance.

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.”

Of course, when one leaves the realm of “particles,” no matter how small they may be, or how they behave or how tenuous their “physical” construction, then all restraints could well be off. As in the case of his CU’s, Seth’s “subjective motions and activities,” his “simultaneous events,” would easily be the rule in the basic nonphysical universe.