“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Without taking into account here the essences of other life forms, do I think the human personality survives physical death? Considering the loving, passionate “work” that Jane and I engaged in for more than twenty years, of course I do. No other answer makes intuitive or consciously reasonable sense to me. I think it quite psychologically and psychically limiting to believe otherwise, for such beliefs can only impede or postpone our further conscious understanding of the individual and mass realities — the overall “nature” — we’re creating. I think that all of us seek answers, and that our searches are expressed in our very lives.

In those terms I have my own proofs of survival, just as Jane had — and as she still does. We always had far too many questions about such matters to be satisfied with the very restrictive “answers” that our religious and secular establishments offer. I cannot believe that in matters of life and death my psyche would be so foolish as to indulge in wish fulfillment, relaying to me only those ideas it “thinks” I want to consciously know. Each time I may feel my own ignorance about even our own physical reality, let alone other realities, I fall back upon my own feelings and beliefs. I have nowhere else to turn, really, nor did Jane. As Seth told us in a number of ways (and to some extent I’m certainly paraphrasing him here), “Never accept a theory that contradicts your own experience.” Jane and I found much better answers for ourselves, even if they were — and are — only approximations of more basic, and perhaps even incomprehensible, truths. My unimpeded, creative psyche intuitively knows that positive answers to its questions exist, that otherwise it wouldn’t bother to ask those questions within nature’s marvelous framework, that nature is alive and, as best we can sensually conceive of it, eternal. My psyche knows that it makes no sense within nature’s context for the human personality to be obliterated upon physical death.

(See the considerable world-view material from Jane and from Seth in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. A world view is the body of an individual’s personalized interpretation of the physical universe; emotions are necessarily involved. “Each person has such a world view,” Seth tells us in Session 718, “whether living or dead in your terms, and that ‘living picture’ exists despite time or space. It can be perceived by others.”)

Valerie’s material raises as many questions as it gives answers for, of course. Are her messages really from Jane, or is she “only” telepathically picking up from me what I want to hear, and flashing it back to me from her trance states — as communications from Jane? An unbelieving scientist would say that Valerie is hardly in touch with a discarnate Jane, since science doesn’t accept survival of death. Nor would the idea of reaching Jane’s world view be considered, or telepathy from me, for both of those concepts are scientifically unacceptable. The most parsimonious view — the simplest, stingiest one — would be that through studying the Seth Material Valerie subconsciously divines the replies I want from my dead wife, and in all subjective innocence comes through with her trance messages for me, to fit my own stubborn belief in Jane’s survival.

You will join me as I have joined others.
No physical form or physical thought
can express my existence.
The term love, with its message
of caring for another,
is the most important of our
messages in the physical.
Seth Two is to me now what Seth was to you.
I am a step higher but not removed.
Yet, I have changed enough since “my
death” that it is difficult,
at times, to relate to your existence.
The love and the emotions you feel are
the connectives between us.
My love for you has not changed but expanded
in a way you do not comprehend.
Physical needs are for physical beings,
and I understand and know this.
Touch is important at your level.
My new or returned mind loves you more
deeply than in our earth time together,
but it is also much more
understanding of physical need.
When I said, “Be for me as I would
be for thee,” I didn’t mean to limit you.
Be the physical person you need to be,
as you are physical for a limited and
for a purposeful reason.
Enjoy physical reality between others,
for the mind endures and exists
beyond your understanding and existence.
I love you as you were
and as we will be.
Your now is for you to enjoy.
I never judge your actions, and this
I repeat with love and utmost understanding.
Be yourself and in being yourself
you will be for me as I would be for thee.
You do well and I watch you often.
Continue to love physical life
while you are physical.

Indeed. A commitment is required upon my part in this case: I think that Valerie’s message for me is from Jane. A possible qualification of that belief can be that the material is interwound with data Valerie picked up from Jane’s world view, where Jane wouldn’t have necessarily been involved — only the body of her personalized and emotional experience in physical life. I cannot objectively prove either of those pro-positions. Yet I have my own intuitive proof, because I strongly feel that the contents of Valerie’s message fit very well both the physical and the nonphysical Jane Roberts.

To me, even thinking about an entity who has died is a form of communication with the essence of that departed one, whatever its nature, shape, and complexity “was.” We must have much to consciously learn here. Imagine our planet swinging through its orbit independently of the sun’s illumination. I’ve often thought that if each birth and each death was signalled by a flash of light, an observer in space would see an earth that was always bathed in a flickering gentle glow because of all of the activities of consciousness going on there. What a profound and revealing sight that would be!

Obviously, my life has been enriched in numerous and unexpected ways by knowing Jane, and I feel myself still growing, still asking questions. I was blessed, then — a situation that in my youth I’d hardly dared hope for in conventional terms, yet had been open enough in my beliefs to create. The cave that I’d felt open up inside me after Jane’s death is closing and healing itself, while leaving its inevitable psychic imprint.

‘These days I dream about Jane,’ I wrote in my article for Reality Change, ‘and feel her presence just as much as ever, yet my mourning is inevitably enlightened by new forces and experiences. This is just the way Jane wants it to be; she told me not long before she died that she didn’t want me to spend my life in grief and alone. I agreed with her when she said those things but had little idea of the emotional depths of sadness and yearning that one must face and live with before becoming free enough to turn one’s thoughts outward into the world again.’