“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The first episode involved a couple I will call Jim and Ann Linden. Ann, a complete stranger, called me on the phone one morning. Since she dialed me directly, there was no indication that this was a long-distance call, and I thought she was calling from town, particularly since she mentioned having relatives in Elmira. She told me that her son, Peter, had died a few months ago at the age of three. She and her husband were distraught, she said, and a friend of theirs, Ray Van Over, a parapsychologist in New York, had suggested she call me.

She insisted that a shower and quick supper would fix him up like new. We agreed that she and Jim would be at our apartment around eight.

I knew Rob was right, though: Some self-protection is necessary on my part. Besides the mother-in-law episode, there had been a few other upsetting ones involving emotional situations I’d “picked up” from living people. In any case, when I can get such excellent material from Seth, it seems that my primary responsibility lies in that direction. All of these feelings were in the back of my mind that night, when Jim and Ann came.

“Oh no,” Ann said, “but Jim got home early in the afternoon, and we thought it only took a few hours to get to Elmira.”

Jim and Ann arrived about 10 P.M. Rob and I liked them at once. They were in their late twenties, intelligent, and, like us, informal. Over wine they told us about their son. “He was exceptionally bright,” Jim said. “He was fantastic, and I’m not just saying that because he was our child. From the start he was way above average, quick in his reactions, so much so that we were almost frightened in a way. And then, overnight, he died of aplastic anemia. No one even knows what causes it.”

Now Seth was staring out through my open eyes. My gestures were his. He looked Jim right in the face as he talked. Ann and Rob both took notes. Phil just sat, listening.

“He was involved in scientific endeavors both in Atlantis and Egypt, but he had no desire to continue those pursuits now. He had gone quite beyond them. You [Jim] were also involved with him in two past lives in the same relationship, and as priests you both were interested in the inner workings of the universe.”

Seth went on to say that Jim had fallen by the wayside in some respects, forgetting what he had learned in the past. “He [Peter] could not force you to remember, but he could give you a nudge and a push, and in this existence he did so.

According to Seth, Peter’s own reincarnations had really been completed before he was born this time. He’d returned to die young so that Jim and Ann would be forced to ask the questions they were now asking.

Seth went on to give an analysis of Jim’s present personality as it was connected with events from past lives, and to give him some advice about the future. Jim told us earlier that he had been a disc jockey. Now Seth said, “No one can tell you what road to follow. You have the answers within you. Beware of those who give you ready answers. I am speaking in terms of probabilities, for the future is plastic.”

He suggested that Jim stay out of the acting field, because in his case it led to a confusion as to the nature of his own identity. Seth advised him to stay with communications, saying that if he continued in radio there would be another radio job, and then an emergence into another line of work.

He said more about the symbolism of Peter’s illness, spoke about Jim’s past relationships with Ann, and said that Jim had mathematical abilities he was not using. “They result from your two priestly existences where you were both highly involved with calculations having to do with movement of the planets.”

There was more, much of it verified on the spot. Though they hadn’t anything to do with reincarnation, these impressions did have a lot to do with demonstrating to Jim and Ann that we do have the ability to receive knowledge other than through the physical senses. The events that I “picked up” were often emotionally significant to the Lindens, though trivial in other respects.

Seth devoted the very last part of the session to Phil, and it was well past one in the morning before we were finished. Jim and Ann went away convinced that their son’s life and death had a meaning, that there was sense and purpose in their lives, and that even this seeming tragedy operated for a greater good.

I felt pretty humble when the whole thing was over. Jim and Ann were almost transformed, and before the session, I had been so dubious that I hesitated. (The thing is, when I consciously think in such a limited fashion, my intuitive inner self rises up and shows me that much more is involved than the ego. Actually I think that these abilities flow through us as the wind flows through the branches.) Ann wrote me a letter shortly after, telling me that she and Jim no longer felt the tremendous sorrow that had burdened them earlier.

More and more I have seen how reincarnation makes sense out of such apparently senseless tragedies, and provides an inner structure to situations that would otherwise seem chaotic and unjust. I was so pleased to be able to help Ann and Jim; and that session and others like it have helped me also by showing me the value of ideas that originally I could not accept. The same thing applies to Seth: I am literally amazed at his capacity to help others, at his psychological understanding, at all the abilities he draws upon and focuses in our sessions.