“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Have you lived before, and will you live again? According to Seth all of us have been reincarnated, and when we are finished living our series of earthly lives, we will continue to exist in other systems of reality. In each life we experience conditions that we have chosen beforehand, circumstances and challenges tailored to fit our own needs and develop our own abilities.

Think about it: Some of us are born brilliant and some mad, some with bodies swift and elegant, others missing vital organs or whole limbs. Some of us are born so blessed with riches that we live in a world hardly imaginable to the majority of men, and others grow old and die in dark pockets of poverty, equally incomprehensible. Why? Only reincarnation weaves these seemingly disparate conditions into a framework that makes sense. According to Seth these situations are not thrust upon us, but chosen.

Why would anyone choose a life of illness or poverty? And what about children who die young, or servicemen killed in war? All of these questions came into our minds when Seth began speaking about reincarnation. As I mentioned earlier, when the sessions started I didn’t believe that we survived death once, much less many times. If we lived before, I thought, and if we can’t remember, then what good does it do? “Besides,” I said to Rob, “Seth says that we live in the ‘Spacious Present,’ and that there really isn’t any past, present, and future. So how can we live one life ‘before’ another?”

Some of the answers cropped up in readings given for others, where Seth was dealing with specific cases. I do not give readings or sessions for the public (nor do I charge fees or accept contributions), so the reincarnational readings were those we had for students, friends, or for those who had asked for assistance in a particularly tragic problem. For that matter, Seth doesn’t give such readings unless they have bearing on the matter at hand.

“I’ve only met Ray once,” I said. “He must have told you that I don’t give readings but concentrate on our private work and the Seth sessions.”

I told Rob, and while he said that it was up to me, he wasn’t too happy. “Remember what happened last time you tried to contact someone’s deceased relative?” he said. “Anyway, let Seth handle it.”

“Seth just wasn’t around,” I said. “If he had been, he probably would have given me the information, and I wouldn’t have had to go through all that.”

“Still, I don’t want to go overboard in my reactions,” I said. “The Lindens only want to know about their little boy. Besides, I’ll let Seth handle it. It’s a session night, after all.”

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.

That’s the last thing I remember saying as myself. The next moment Seth’s deep booming voice came rushing through me: “The boy was briefly with you for his own reasons. He was to enlighten you, and so he did. You have known him in past lives. At one time, he was his present father’s uncle.

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.

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.

At one point Seth smiled broadly and said, “Now, I have lived and died many times, and you can sense my vitality. And I tell you that the boy’s vitality exists in as vital terms. It would have been almost a penance for him to have stayed longer. You helped him ‘save his soul’ at one time [in a past life] and he was returning the favor. At one time he was tempted to use his abilities to gain power, and to use the priesthood for gain. On that occasion you stopped him.”

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.

Seth gave more information concerning the past lives of all involved, then added, “I am giving you what I believe is the most important information, whether you can check it out or not. … Your inner selves digest what I have said, and this is more important than ten pages of notes and dates that you cannot check, since these lives were so long ago.”

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.

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.

Another similar case, involving the death of a child, concerned a woman who attended a few of my classes. Her fifteen-year-old adopted son had drowned a few months earlier. Seth said in a session that the boy had been a sailor in several past lives and still regarded death by water as preferable to dying on land. The boy had been related to his foster mother in another life, and also returned to help her gain needed inner development. He died early so that his death would make her question, and search for answers. She had been running from medium to medium, trying to contact the boy. In no uncertain terms, Seth told her to stop this practice and to work for inner development instead.

According to Seth, we choose our illnesses and the circumstances of our birth and death. This applies to every illness, whether it is a broken leg suffered from an accident, or an ulcer. This doesn’t mean that we consciously make a choice in the way we’re used to; we don’t sit down and say, “Well, I think I’ll get a broken leg this afternoon at three in front of Rand’s drugstore.” Some part of us is upset and chooses an illness or accident as a way of expressing this inner situation. This will be explained in the chapter on health, along with Seth’s instructions on the maintenance of good health and vitality.

But what about serious diseases—and where does reincarnation fit into the picture? To begin with, Seth does not use the word “punishment.” We are not “punished” in one life for the “transgressions” of a past one. Nor do we choose illness per se as a given life situation, even though we may utilize such an illness as a part of a larger plan, as a method of teaching ourselves some important truth or as a means of developing certain abilities.

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.”

I really felt besieged, mostly because I wanted to help so badly. Then again I managed to remember that the inner I was so much stronger than the Jane-I, and that Seth knew much more than either of us. So I agreed.

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.

Notice that Seth did not mention other topics until he gave the above advice—and that it was for the husband and those caring for the patient rather than for the patient herself. At the end of the first session, Seth said, “There are past life connections operating. Right now it is not as important for you to know these as it is to take the steps I am outlining.”

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.

Seth began by saying that Karma does not involve punishment. “Karma presents the opportunity for development. It enables the individual to enlarge understanding through experience, to fill in gaps of ignorance, to do what should be done. Free will is always involved.”

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.”

Seth went on to say that even in such apparently tragic conditions, the personality is not abandoned. “The inner self, as distinguished from the more accessible subconscious, is aware of the situation and finds release through frequent inner communications where successes are remembered and reexperienced. The dream state becomes an extremely vivid time, for such experiences assure the personality of its larger nature. It knows it is more than the self that it has for a time chosen to be.”

Seth answered, “This is characteristic of that entity, an impatience and yet a daring, because the situation represented such a challenge. All the weak points are intensified, hence the gravity of the physical situation. The entity preferred this, rather than a series of smaller difficulties. In this, Jon subconsciously acquiesced, to learn patience and forbearing—to take what he considered his medicine all in one dose, so to speak.”

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.