“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Dictation: Again, there are no accidents. No one dies under any circumstances who is not prepared to die. This applies to death through natural catastrophe as well as to any other situation.

Slow death in a hospital, or an experience with an illness, would be unthinkable to these same people. Some of this has to do with temperament, and with quite normal individual differences and preferences. Many more human beings are aware of their own impending deaths than is generally known. They know and yet pretend they do not know, but those who die in catastrophes choose the experience — the drama, even the terror when that occurs. They prefer to leave physical life in a blaze of perception, battling for their lives, at a point of challenge, “fighting” and not acquiescent.

Individual reactions follow this innate knowledge, for while man fears the unleashed power of nature and tries to protect himself from it, he revels in it and identifies with it at the same time. (Pause.) The more “civilized” man becomes, the more his social structures and practices separate him from intimate relationship with nature — and the more natural catastrophes there will be, because underneath he senses his great need for identification with nature; he will himself conjure it into earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods, so that he can once again feel not only their energy but his own.

This recognition can lead them — and often does — to seize their own energy and use it in a strong creative manner. A natural catastrophe or a riot are both energy baths, potent and highly positive in their ways despite their obvious connotations. In your terms this in no way absolves those who start riots, for example, for they will be working within a system of conscious beliefs in which violence begets violence. Yet even here individual differences apply. The inciters of riots are often searching for the manifestation of energy which they do not believe they possess on their own. They light and start psychological fires, and are as transfixed by the results as any arsonist. If they understood and could experience power and energy in themselves they would not need such tactics.

(10:27.) There are as many reasons then for “earth illnesses” as there are for body illnesses. To some extent the same can be said of wars, if you consider a war as a small infection; in the case of a world war, it would be a massive disease. War will finally teach you to revere life. Natural catastrophes will remind you that you cannot ignore your planet or your creaturehood. At the same time such experiences themselves provide contact with the deepest energies of your being — even when they are being used “destructively.”

As your conscious beliefs determine your bodily condition, and as your body is maintained at an unconscious level (though in line with your beliefs), so natural catastrophes are the result of the beliefs that give rise to emotional states which are then automatically transformed into exterior atmospheric conditions.

(Pause.) Instead of a flood, disastrous social upheavals could have erupted. Because of the peculiar, unique and characteristic feeling-tones involved, however, the resulting emotional tensions were released, automatically transformed, into the atmosphere. A natural catastrophe provided many answers. The [Chemung] river was close by, directly in the heart of the business section [of Elmira], for example.