“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Their definitions in fact squeeze human motivation into an impossibly small tube of action. (Long pause.) When that tube of motivation is all squeezed out, the tube is supposed to then become empty. The wide range of actual human experience is far too great for such small packaging. The belief in the struggle for survival so super-pervades that anything but the most competitive, determined, super-valiant, compulsive desire to hold onto life appears to be cowardly, a cop-out, at best an unexplainable, erratic, unnatural response to life’s conditions.

(8:43.) In that framework it almost seems as if the most natural wish would be the wish to live one life for some kind of eternal duration. In that framework it seems as if people are cut down in their primes often, despite their own wishes, desires or intents, and it is taken for granted that death is the undesired, unwanted, unsought victor over creatures whose natural desires lead them to fight for natural survival at all costs. Certainly this suggests an almost unbearable cruelty, thrust upon nature’s framework. (Long pause.) The impulse toward life is indeed strong, brilliant and enduring. Each individual knows, however, that more than one lifetime is involved, and carries within it—as indeed the animals do—the knowledge that earth’s existence is in time and space, meaning that a certain turnover is necessarily implied.

(Long pause.) The purposes and value fulfillment intents of some people are often reached in your terms at a young age. They give to life and receive from life more or less what they intended to, and are quite prepared to die and start anew. In a manner of speaking, now, illnesses also serve as gateways to death in that regard—which may or may not be chosen at any specific time. That is, they are available. No one is forced to enter those gateways. Some people (pause) know very well that they have decided to die—or do not care (colon): they may “come down” with severe illnesses and then change their minds because for other reasons the very crises revive them.

In those terms it is like a creative venture, finished to the best of one’s ability in the given medium, and leaves one with a sense of satisfaction, fulfillment, and completion. (Long pause.) One woman wrote Ruburt about the definite healing of her mother from cancer. There were many details given—but overall the woman felt that she herself had made a bargain with God, offering her own life instead of her mother’s. The mother recovered under the most unexpected circumstances, and a short time later the daughter came down with the same symptoms.

She seemed to acquiesce to them. She did not feel alarmed. Ruburt wrote that one did not have to bargain with God for one’s life—an excellent point. One had only to accept one’s life—a second excellent point. Still, Ruburt was uneasy that the woman would accept the situation so calmly. Such recognition seemed almost unnatural: where was her will to live?

(Long pause at 9:12.) Many people, wanting to die, do not seek out illnesses, of course. They may die in their sleep of unexplained heart failure or whatever, or in accidents. They may seek death out in dangerous pursuits. In the framework of general beliefs, however, the natural desire for death is not included in the list of human motivations. Often such a desire comes naturally and passes naturally several times in a lifetime. The clear recognition of such a psychological feeling alone helps such individuals understand their own positions and intents, but usually the feeling itself is forced to go underground because people are so afraid of it. Such a feeling, recognized, can also serve—as it did serve the woman’s mother—as a critical point of recognition that the desire to die was triggered not so much (long pause) by the feeling of life’s completion as by the fact that the individual had set up too many restrictions in life itself—restrictions that were severely cutting back its own possibilities of value fulfillment, or future effective action. In that kind of a case, the situation can serve to reverse the conditions. The person recognizes the restrictions and changes his or her ways accordingly, opening the doorway not into death but to further life and action in this space and time.

(Long pause.) Overall, the psychology of death of course then involves the psychology of life, for people are seeking for a value fulfillment that connects each of their lives—that is, in reincarnational terms.

Children accept life wholeheartedly. They do not qualify it. The woman who had cancer and was cured gave up the restrictions she had placed about her life. Nothing in nature is wasted. There is no such thing as a wasted life, no matter how it might appear, and while the desire for death is a natural one, it can also serve at various stages as one that extends any given life for a while by clearing away old debris. The desire actually works for the purpose of value fulfillment, whether it can be pursued more fully in this life, or whether it is time to begin a new one.