“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:32.) Again, as mentioned earlier, an individual can be so certain that death is the end of all, that oblivion, though temporary, results. In many cases, immediately on leaving the body there is, of course, amazement and a recognition of the situation. The body itself may be viewed, for example, and many funerals have a guest of honor amidst the company — and no one gazes into the face of the corpse with as much curiosity and wonder.

At this point many variations in behavior emerge, each the result of individual background, knowledge, and habit. The surroundings in which the dead find themselves will often vary. Vivid hallucinations may form experience quite as real as any in mortal life. Now, I have told you that thoughts and emotions form physical reality, and they form after-death experience. This does not mean that the experiences are not valid, any more than it means that physical life is not valid.

Remember that in one way, your physical existence is the result of mass hallucination. Vast gulfs exist between one man’s reality and another’s. After death, experience has as much organization, highly intricate and involved, as you know now. You have your private hallucinations now, only you do not realize what they are. Such hallucinations as I have been speaking of, intense symbolistic encounters, can also occur in your sleep states, when the personality is at a time of great change, or when opposing ideas must be unified, or if one must give way to another. These are highly charged, significant psychological and psychic events, whether they happen before or after death.

(11:05.) Occurring in the dream state, they can change the course of a civilization. After death, an individual may visualize his (immediately previous physical) life as an animal with which he must come to terms, and such a battle or encounter has far-reaching consequences, for the man must come to terms with all portions of himself. In this case, whether the hallucination ends with him riding the animal, making friends with it, domesticating it, killing it or being killed by it, each alternative… (Jane coughed, then paused and took a sip of beer) is carefully weighed, and the results will have much to do with his future development.