“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The session started late because of our experimenting with a high-quality stereo recording and playing system we bought yesterday. Jane has wanted this especially for work with Sumari. Acting upon impulse while we were in the store, I bought one of those watches that gives not only the time of day but the day of the month. For some reason I find this latter feature quite amusing.)

(See the 636th session in Chapter Nine for some material on karma, reincarnation, and Seth’s idea of “simultaneous” time.)

Now: The third diagram can cut across the other systems of belief, of course. In the first two groups there are many leeways. You may have one, two or three preferred characteristics that correlate with your ideas, for example, but your concepts about age leave you no such freedom; for at one time or another all of you, “if you are lucky” in your terms, will approach old age.

Many believe that it is a time of spiritual and/or physical deterioration, an era in which all those hard-won attributes of maturity vanish, and the reasoning faculties disappear like grains of sand held too long by the thinking hands of the mind.

You are used to thinking in terms of heredity. In physical terms, and in a different way than you imagine, this is important. Certain earth experiences however are dependent upon duration in time, and result as a consequence of the mind playing upon its experience through long earth seasons.

There are specific functions brought into operation quite naturally that are scarcely perceived by your scientists, much less understood. As the mind within the body clearly sees its earthly time coming to an end, mental and psychic accelerations take place. These are in many ways like adolescent experiences in their great bursts of creative activity, with the resulting formation of questions, and the preparation for a completely new kind of personality growth and fulfillment.

The individual, when it is time then, begins to see beyond temporal life, to open up dimensions of awareness that in your terms he or she could not afford while involved in the intense physical focus of normal adult life. Unfortunately the personality has no system of beliefs, as a rule, to support such an expansion. The natural therapies, both physical and mental, are denied. Drugs are often used as depressants, clouding the clarity of what seems to be distorted vision. This is one of the most creative, valuable aspects of your lives. Instead the old are made to feel useless in your society. Often of course they share this value judgment, and their experience within your communities has in no way prepared them to face subjective experience.

Even the chemical and hormonal changes that occur are those that are conducive to spiritual and psychic growth at that time. The joyful affirmation possible is denied to the old because of your system of beliefs.

(Jane and I have had some preparation for the information, at least on emotional levels. My father died in February, 1971, after spending three years in a county “home.” Diagnosis: senility. For much of that time he had been under varying degrees of sedation. In light of tonight’s material, I couldn’t help feeling that he’d lost part of his natural heritage — whether he had decided upon that course himself, whether it had been imposed upon him, or both. Seth, I thought, would say that my father chose all the circumstances of his life, and that such a deprivation in old age was a probable result that materialized physically. But while agreeing, I could still wish it had been otherwise….

The peculiar chemical changes that occur are often precisely those that lead to greater conceptions and experience, but these are free from what you think of as practical application. There is a trigger set off then, an impetus in which the personality tries to free itself from time-space orientation released from the usual necessity to participate in “adult” terms.