“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I couldn’t believe it when I realized that my wife had been dead for a week. As I lived and worked in it, our house looked the same as it ever had. In spite of my sorrow, I presented a cheerful face to the world; I talked and joked, and did everything I was supposed to do. I also discovered what must be a very common phenomenon: Those who knew of Jane’s passing became instantly self-conscious when we met. I felt their embarrassment at their damned-up sympathies, and their fear of the same thing happening to them. They didn’t want to hurt me further. Amazingly, I found myself offering comfort to them, to help them surmount such barriers so that we could talk. My visitors reminded me anew of how private an event Jane’s death is for me, yet how universal it is. How many uncounted quadrillions of times has that transference from “life” to “nonlife” taken place just on our planet alone? And I don’t believe that anyone has tried to cope with questions of life and death any more valiantly than Jane did.

That vision reminds me of a letter of mine that has just appeared in Reality Change, a magazine its editor is devoting to the Seth Material, and publishing in Austin, Texas. At her request last September, I briefly described my feelings a year after Jane’s death. I mentioned how worthwhile it would be to throughly study the continuous global healing processes that I believe constitute one of the earth’s major forces, so that we could consciously use them to “help our species lead itself into new areas of thought and feeling.” Now I enlarge upon that idea by stating that such processes should be studied amid the earth’s even larger life-and-death cycles — those making up that “flickering gentle glow” my mythical observer would see from space. I think that eventually we’ll regard all life upon our planet — or upon any other — in such terms, that we’ll be led to do so by our own needs and creative curiosity. Beyond that will lie our exploring, as Jane did, the more basic nonphysical nature of reality.

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.

The session went on as Seth gave Rob some excellent psychological insights into his own behavior, and tied this is with early experience in this life, and with relationships with his present family in past life existences. [...]

[...] Besides, I felt that this was “my thing;” something that came unannounced, suddenly, into my life; something that I could not ignore; that I had to see through or regret my lack of courage for the rest of my life. [...]

The life of any given individual could be legitimately compared to the dream of an entity. [...] As you give inner purpose and organization to your dreams, and as you obtain insight and satisfaction from them, though they involve only a portion of your life, so the entity to some extent directs and gives purpose and organization to his personalities. [...]

[...] “Like me, in the Denmark life you told me about?”

But I still couldn’t quite believe in personal life after death. [...] “And just maybe, with the Malba episode, I picked up knowledge of her life from the same source.”

She couldn’t explain much about her own situation, however, though she insisted that she was happier where she was than she had been in this life. [...]

[...] She said again that he was a poor farmer and that her life had been a lonely one, since she had few friends. [...]

The camouflage is necessary at this stage of development — intricate, complicated, various and beyond the understanding of the outer senses, which are the perceptors of the camouflage itself, peculiarly adapted to see under particular circumstances … It is only the inner senses that will give you any evidence at all of the basic nature of life.

[...] The implied promise of recurring life contrasted drearily with the few things we knew about life while we were in the flesh — much less free of it.

[...] “When I think of the same thing in practical terms, apply it to life, that’s when I pull my horns in.”

[...] Why was life constructed to be destroyed? [...]

I’d identified all life with the birds, of course. [...]

[...] The awareness of plant life is also somewhat like that of the subject in deep trance. Except for the suggestion and stimulus received by regular natural forces on your plane, the plant life does not bestir itself in other directions. [...]

[...] The inner senses of all plant life are well attuned, alert and very vital. [...]

[...] The awareness of plant life lies along these lines.

[...] Rob “knew” that he was seeing the bedroom in which his brother, Dick, had died in a past life in England. [...]

[...] Seth told Rob that he’d seen only part of the room, described the rest of it and gave further details about Dick’s English life. [...]

[...] Words really come to life as he speaks them.)

“Seth,” Rob said, “Jane had several confused dreams in which she seemed to be getting or giving instructions in life readings.”

“Would you know it if you saw it in physical life now? [...]

[...] They didn’t like their babies dying, but they just thought that … that was life. [...]

[...] In your past life [in Boston] you would have known better.

The fact that you slipped so easily into this frame should remind you of abilities that you had at one time in another life; then you misused them. [...]