“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I hadn’t read today’s local paper until I had a minute to scan it while we waited for the session to begin. Jane had read it, however, yet missed the article I called to her attention. It’s attached to this session as page 302 and describes what seems to be in ordinary terms a senseless and horrendous story: A 20-year-old drunken driver crashed head-on into another auto, killing two people, the father and an aunt, and putting the other five passengers, all members of the same family, into the hospital. Since the article is attached, we can pass up the details here. Jane and I talked about the feelings of guilt and blame that are fated to surround the survivors for the rest of their lives, particularly the teenage children and the drunk driver. It seemed that they would carry a heavy burden for perhaps half a century, say. For my part, although I believe Seth’s contention that there are basically no accidents, I was still torn between understanding of that premise, and outrage that a young drunk could wreak such havoc on a seemingly innocent family of seven people. I didn’t know whether to attempt to forgive him or demand life imprisonment, for example. In short, I thought it grossly unfair that the cause of the accident was still alive—although hospitalized —while two “innocent” victims were dead, with a whole family damaged beyond repair, for life. It seemed too much to bear, and quite unexplainable in ordinary conscious-mind terms. I thought it a classic example that could be explained in Seth’s terms, though—the type of new information that at least could try to make sense out of such seemingly random happenings that we see as so tragic. In that way, then, my discussion of the event touched upon pretty basic premises of the Seth material.

You organize experience in certain highly ritualized patterns. Your conscious mind perceives these clearly, while you pretend that this official version is all that exists. Your conscious mind, generally speaking, interprets reality according to your private beliefs and those of your civilization. As long as the civilization maintains certain beliefs, then events must be perceived in a complementary fashion.

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.

In larger terms, much larger terms, all events are creative. Physical life is a fantastic event, in which all kinds of preferences, feelings, beliefs, desires, and experiences are possible—within of course the physical level.

In the case of your newspaper story, the same kinds of events happened several times in various ways to all of the people involved. At unconscious levels the results were known, and the seeming accident was a planned event—a play ready to happen when all parties involved found the circumstances apt.

The father (a Mr. Moore, killed at age 47) had other difficulties. He did not want to die of a long illness. He felt trapped. He wanted to leave his wife (who is 49) and yet could not bring himself to do so. The older woman (an aunt, killed at age 77) also wanted a quick death. The wife, however, also unconsciously aware of the events, would therefore share in them.

(9:49.) In a way they will feel special—saved from the “clutches of death.” In perhaps a manner that appears strange, they will experience a new sense of their own validity, for if they were saved from death, then something—if only the fates—must have found them worthy. This does not mean that they will not feel guilty also at their good fortune, but it does mean that their lives will for them have a special brilliance and a contrast, in whose light they will experience all the other events of their years.

He was looking for someone like the young boy, someone whose actions would result in his death, but in a death without malice, a death that would in its way serve an important purpose. For the “accident” saved the young man’s life, and this was our father’s final gift to the world. The boy was inclined toward suicide. He would not have taken anyone with him. He wanted to die, but also in an indirect fashion, in that he could not consciously shoot himself, while he could kill himself in an event that seemed to be accidental.

He had nearly killed himself before in the same fashion, and also when not drinking. The accident gives him a specific event upon which to lay his guilt, but coming so close to death, his own instincts for life were rearoused, so that he is literally given a second chance.

The conventional conscious mind pretends, and pretends well. It pretends that accidents are possible, that death is an end, and it tries to ignore all of the great threads of feeling and intent that do not fit into that picture. It is a game of hide and seek, for emotionally all of the participants in that “accident” were aware of the approaching event, and at the last moment it could have been avoided.

(Our conversation about this during break led me to what I think is an exceptionally good idea for a book—one done even in conventional terms. It would be for the author to conduct a survey of the surviving members of families involved in such accidents, to study the after-effects, see what changes the tragedy had brought about in their lives, their habits, ways of thinking and looking at life—in short, the detailed study of each family case history would comprise an intimate, in-depth probing of all the complicated effects that had resulted from that single tragic event.