“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

People die for “a cause” only when they have found no cause to live by. And when it seems that the world is devoid of meaning, then some people will make a certain kind of statement through the circumstances connected with their own deaths.

There are purposes not nearly as easy to describe, however, intents of a psychological nature, yearnings toward satisfactions not so easily categorized. Man experiences ambitions, desires, likes and dislikes of a highly emotional nature — and at the same time he has intellectual beliefs about himself, his feelings, and the world. These are the result of training, for you use your mind as you have been taught.

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.

Once more — (humorously:) that will save you from scratching out another “again,” “however,” or whatever — your body is mobilized when you want to move. It responds to your intent and purpose. It is your private inner environment, psychically speaking. Your psychological intents instantly mobilize your energies on a psychic level. You have what I will call for now “a body of thought,” and it is that “body” that constantly springs into action at your intent.

When you want to go downtown, you know that destination exists, though you may be miles away from it. When you want to find a mate you take it for granted that a potential mate exists, though where in space and time you do not know. Your intent to find a mate sends out “strands of consciousness,” however, composed of desire and intent. Like detectives, these search the world, looking in a completely different way than a physical sleuth. The world is probed with your characteristics in mind, seeking for someone else with characteristics that will best suit your own. And whatever your purpose is, the same procedure on a psychic level is involved.

The organization of your feelings, beliefs, and intents directs the focus about which your physical reality is built. This follows with impeccable spontaneity and order. If you believe in the sinfulness of the world, for instance, then you will search out from normal sense data those facts that confirm your belief. But beyond that, at other levels you also organize your mental world in such a way that you attract to yourself events that — again — will confirm your beliefs.

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.