“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Here is how this process works in a specific instance. Again, a phone call was involved, this time from a man I’ll call Jon who called me from another part of the country, right after my first book was published two years ago. Jon and his wife were both in their early twenties. I’ll call his wife Sally. After coming down with multiple sclerosis, Sally had been given about a year to live, and Jon wanted to ask Seth if anything could be done for her.

Again I felt this strong desire to help, and again I was filled with doubts. Suppose—just suppose—Seth held a session and suggested treatments or medicine that made Sally worse? I was Jane Roberts, not Edgar Cayce. And how could some stranger have such faith in Seth and my abilities when I was so often filled with doubts myself?

“I’m sure Seth could help,” Jon said. “I knew it as soon as I read your book. Even if Sally can’t be cured, perhaps he could explain things so that her illness would make some kind of sense. Why Sally? She’s never hurt anyone in her life.”

Over a period of two years we’ve had several sessions for Jon and Sally. In that first session, though, Seth gave some excellent advice that is helpful to anyone whenever illness strikes. Before he went into the reincarnational background, which was important in this case, he emphasized the importance played by suggestion and telepathy in the sickroom. Because this has such great general application, I’ll include portions of that passage here:

Seth also said that he would outline a program designed to change Sally’s own expectations, and also suggested treatment by an accredited hypnotist who could instill positive suggestions to rouse her will to live.

He recommended that Sally’s limbs be rubbed with peanut oil, and that iron be added to her diet. He emphasized that she would be happier in another room and said: “I believe you have a fairly small sunny parlor. This room has beneficial connotations for her. Let her be moved there.” In passing he spoke of several episodes in Sally’s present life, some that Jon corroborated in his next letter, and one in particular that he did not know about until Seth mentioned it. Seth said, for example, that she had worked in a five-and-dime store with a girl friend, and that a visit from this friend would be helpful. Jon didn’t know that Sally had worked in such a place, but her mother remembered.

Between the two sessions, Jon wrote telling us that some improvements had been noted, and that he was following Seth’s instructions. He also told us that he did have a room like the one Seth mentioned, and that Sally had been moved into it.

The story of Sally’s past life is fascinating. Note that this was not the life immediately past, but an earlier one in which problems were “shelved” until this existence:

“The woman was a male, Italian, in a hill village. He lost his wife and was left with a highly neurotic crippled daughter for whom he cared for many years. As a man, Sally was called Nicolo Vanguardi [Rob’s phonetic interpretation] and the daughter was named Rosalina. He resented the girl, and while he cared for her, he did not do so kindly.

“The father [Sally in the past life] was thoroughly embittered. The daughter had left too late; he was too old; no one would have him, and now he had no one even to talk to. He hated his daughter the more and railed that she had forsaken him in his old age, after he had cared for her.”

Seth went on to say that in her next life, Sally was reborn as a woman of some artistic merit in a very successful existence, also in Italy. She was the mother of two sons. “Here the personality was born only fifty miles away, and as the wife of a wealthy landowner, she often drove through the very land where the small house [of her former life] still stood with its farm. This in a town badly bombed in the Second World War.”

After that life, however, Sally’s personality decided to take on the unfinished problems of development. “This time the personality is being cared for rather than caring for—being physically dependent. The personality in the earlier existence would not and could not try to understand the circumstances and position of the crippled daughter. Not for a moment then could the personality bear to contemplate the inner reality in personal terms.

“This time Sally plays that part, and is completely immersed in it. Jon was the man with whom the daughter left in the past life. Now Sally loves him, and has learned to see the good points of his personality.

“Through the change of roles, Sally now gains insight on past failures, and also helps her present husband to become more contemplative and to seek answers to questions that he would not have asked otherwise. She is adding to his development and also working out serious flaws that existed in her own personality.”

“While such situations as Sally’s illness are chosen by the personality, the individual is always left to work out its own solution. Complete recovery, illness, or early death are not preordained on the part of the entity [or whole self]. The general situation is set up in response to deep inner involvements.

But Sally was in such terrible condition, going blind, unable to speak or move voluntarily. Why, Jon wrote, couldn’t she have chosen something less damaging? Why couldn’t she have been just sickly for three lives, say, instead of being struck down with such a killing disease in this one?

Seth emphasized that in the life immediately past, Sally had taken a rest from problems, had enjoyed excellent circumstances and fulfilled her creative abilities.

Now, over two years later, Sally is still alive but in poor condition. Seth said that she had solved the challenges she had set for herself, but in so doing had damaged her physical body to such an extent that she had decided to discard it. As of this writing she is in coma. Jon wanted to know what was happening to her in this state. “Is she really conscious someplace else? Or just dreaming? And what happens after death?” In a recent session Seth answered these questions. Many of the answers apply to death in general, so I’ll include some excerpts from this session in the next chapter, and also go into Seth’s ideas on reincarnation more thoroughly.