“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

First of all, a few necessary preliminaries with which you are acquainted. In a manner of speaking, your conscious mind, as you think of it, is a psychological convention. In that regard your society, your civilization, your way of looking at reality—all of these at that level also represent highly conventionalized behavior and learned responses.

While you believe that death represents the end of personal consciousness, then death must indeed seem the ultimate tragedy or surrender. While you believe in conventional ideas of cause and effect, and can discover none in a particular instance, then that event can certainly appear meaningless—perhaps cruel, and certainly the result of an accidental behavior in which all good intent has vanished.

I mentioned before that some people court exciting and dangerous sports, living quite purposefully on the edge of death, and choosing to taste life spiced exotically by the ever-present sprinkling of ashes. Others might say that such behavior is neurotic, but in larger terms such a phrase is meaningless. In the same way, however, some people do live their lives so that its light is experienced in contrast to death in a different fashion—so that the rest of the years’ experiences are seasoned by that earlier taste of death.

There is nothing in man’s nature that makes such behavior essential. A true realistic exploration of the nature of experience would automatically study that kind of emotional interrelationship, but while your society delineates the inner particles of matter, it avoids the inner psychological “particles” that form the most intimate experiences of your lives.