“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is far more important that you understand this than that you become overly concerned with labyrinthian “past reasons,” for you can get so lost in a negative approach that you forget that these beliefs can be changed in the present. For various reasons, you hold beliefs that you can alter at any time. Many individuals die young, for example, because they believe so strongly that old age represents a degradation of the spirit and an insult to the body. They do not want to live under the conditions as they believe them to be. Some quite frankly prefer to die in what others would consider to be the most dire circumstances — swept away by the raging waves of an ocean, or crushed in an earthquake, or battered by the winds of a hurricane.

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.

(9:54.) Natural disasters possess the great rousing energy of powers unleashed, of nature escaping man’s discipline, and by their very characteristics also remind man of his own psyche; for in their way such profound events always involve creativity being born, rising even from the bowels of the earth, reshaping the land and the lives of men.

(10:09.) On quite a different level, riots often serve the same purpose, where the release of energy, for whatever reasons, introduces a group of individuals to the intimate recognition that highly concentrated vitality exists. They may not have found it earlier in their lives.

Crises such as this provide spotlighted views of reality, in which what has been hidden is suddenly only too apparent. In many cases the poor were saved, for most of the old homes and apartment houses survived while the newer ranch-style homes could not stand the onslaught of the water. Yet the college [Elmira College] still found itself with many of the dispossessed needy at its doorstep. Women who had no stronger purpose than playing bridge ended up struggling for survival beside their more destitute sisters. Many of the poor who lost their living quarters discovered qualities of leadership in themselves that astonished them.