“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.

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.”

Locally you had a depressed region not yet in the kind of crisis situation that would draw great federal funds, and highly unstable social and economic conditions coupled with a sense of hopelessness.

It also humbled some, denying them the comfort of social position and belongings at least momentarily, and brought them face to face with others of varying backgrounds with whom they would not have become acquainted otherwise.

(Before I typed this material from my notes, Jane and I discussed whether we should supplement Seth’s rather generalized local data with specific names, dates, and events involving Elmira and Chemung County; this information would cover periods of at least several months before and after the flood of June 23, 1972. We decided it wasn’t necessary — Seth has already made his points sufficiently for this book.

(However, we think a thorough search for relationships between emotional states and the weather in our county would be most interesting. Questions of geographical limits, time, and money enter in, of course; but if the study was at all illuminating, it could be expanded to include the state of New York, for instance, then Pennsylvania — and finally the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. For Tropical Storm Agnes, which had led to the flooding, had been mammoth indeed.