“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(So it seemed that we were about to get underway with another excellent production from Seth, with Jane’s considerable — indeed vital — help. I understood that she might be a little concerned about his starting a new book on such short notice; but on the other hand, I had no doubt at all that Seth — and Jane — could do it. And I wanted her to be creatively involved with a continuing project. I thought it could underlie her daily life like a foundation.

— no Preface. Chapter One: You come into the condition you call life, and pass out of it. In between you encounter a lifetime. Suspended — or so it certainly seems — between birth and death, you wonder at the nature of your own being. You search your experience and study official histories of the past, hoping to find there clues as to the nature of your own reality.

Your life seems synonymous with your consciousness. Therefore it appears that your knowledge of yourself grows gradually, as your self-consciousness develops from your birth. It appears, furthermore, that your consciousness will meet a death beyond which your self-consciousness will not survive. You may think longingly and with an almost hopeful nostalgia of the religion of your childhood, and remember a system of belief that ensured you of immortality. Yet most of you, my readers, yearn for some private and intimate assurances, and seek for some inner certainty that your own individuality is not curtly dismissed at death.

In private life and on the world stage, action is occurring all the time. It is easy to look at yourselves or at the world, comma, to see yourself and become so hypnotized by your present state that all change or growth seems impossible, or to see the world in the same manner.

Astronomers speak of outer space and of galaxies that would dwarf your own. In the world that you recognize there are also wars and rumors of wars, prophets of destruction. Yet in spite of all, the private man or the private woman, unknown, anonymous to the world at large, stubbornly feels within a rousing, determined affirmation that says: “I am important. I have a purpose, even though I do not understand what it is. My life that seems so insignificant and inefficient, is nevertheless of prime importance in some way that I do not recognize.” Period.

Though caught up in a life of seeming frustration, obsessed with family problems, uneasy in sickness, defeated it seems for all practical purposes, some portion of each individual rouses against all disasters, all discouragements, and now and then at least glimpses a sense of enduring validity that cannot be denied. It is to that knowing portion of each individual that I address myself. Period.

I am writing this book through a personality known as Jane Roberts. That is the name given her at her birth. She shares with you the triumphs and travails of physical existence. (A one-minute pause.) Like you, she is presented with a life that seems to begin at her birth, and that is suspended from that point of emergence until the moment of death’s departure. She has asked the same questions that you ask in your quiet moments.