“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For example: when you believe that the universe itself is meaningless, and the accidental result of chance, then of course you must also believe in automobile accidents, and all kinds of chance encounters with fate.

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 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 in many ways wanted to save face, so that his death should indeed appear accidental, and the result of someone else’s fault beside his own. He did not want to live into an old age—but more than that, life had lost its flavor for him. He had sired his children, loved as well as he could, done his job—but there was no contemplative life to look forward to, no greater love than the one with his wife—and that love while conventionally sound enough, did not content him.

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.

The boy was filled with guilt, but a guilt that had no name, no label—a psychological guilt that was the result of his upbringing, and that perhaps involved the existence of a brother. He felt inferior to a sometimes terrifying degree.

(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.

(I told Jane that the farther back the author could reach for his studies, the better, so as to have more room for study as far as the passing years were concerned —say that he interviewed a man of 40 whose father had been killed while the boy was 19, say. The idea actually embodies several ideas, or books. A detailed study of one large family group so involved in a tragedy could easily take up an entire book. Another approach would be half and half: First the family story in usual terms; then that same family story studied with Seth’s ideas in mind. The insights that could result, Jane and I agreed, could have excellent psychological and social implications toward understanding of such seemingly senseless accidents. I think that Seth’s insights into the accident discussed this evening are a good capsule case in point, and much more penetrating than could be arrived at in usual terms.