“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We will shortly return to a discussion of such “causes,” and their relationship with the person’s feeling that life has or does not have a meaning.

Those who believe in the ultimate meaning of their lives can withstand such pressures, and often such dilemmas, and others like them, are resolved in an adequate-enough fashion. Disappointments, conflicts, and feelings of powerlessness can begin to make unfortunate inroads in the personalities of those who believe that life itself has little meaning. Such people begin to imagine impediments in their paths as surely as anyone would who imagined that physical barriers were suddenly put up between them and a table they wanted to reach at the end of the room.

Death is a part of you, even as birth is. Its import varies according to the individual — and in a certain fashion, death is your last chance to make a statement of import in any given life, if you feel you have not done so earlier.

Some people’s deaths are quiet periods. Some others’ are exclamation points, so that later it can be said that the person’s death loomed almost greater in importance than the life itself. Some people die in adolescence, filled with the flush of life’s possibilities, still half-dazzled by the glory of childhood, and ready to step with elation upon the threshold of adulthood — or so it seems. Many such young persons prefer to die at that time, where they feel the possibilities for fulfillment are intricate and endless. They are often idealists, who beneath it all — beneath the enthusiasm, the intelligence, and sometimes beneath extraordinary ability — still feel that life could no more than sully those abilities, dampen those spiritual winds, and darken that promise that could never be fulfilled.

This is not the reason for all such deaths by any means, but there is usually an implied statement in them so that the death seems to have an additional meaning that makes parents and contemporaries question. Such individuals usually choose deaths with a high dramatic content, because regardless of appearances they have not been able to express the dramatic contents of their psyches in the world as it seems to be to them. They turn their deaths into lessons for other people, forcing them to ask questions that would not be asked before. There are also mass statements of the same kind for people come together to die, however, to seek company in death as they do in life. People who feel powerless, and who find no cause for living, can come together then and “die for a cause” that did not give them the will or reason to live. They will seek out others of their kind.

(10:05.) The inner mechanics of emotions and beliefs are complicated, but these are individuals who feel that physical life has failed them. They are powerless in society. They think in black and white, and conflicts between their emotions, and their beliefs about their emotions, lead them to seek some kind of shelter in a rigid belief system that will give them rules to go by. Such systems lead to the formation of cults, and the potential members seek out a leader who will serve their purposes as surely as they seem to serve his — through an inner mechanics of which each member is at least somewhat aware.