“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.

These impressions also included some statements concerning the origin of the disease that killed Peter. Its cause is unknown, and there is no reason to go into my explanation here. But the characteristic symptoms of the disease I gave also described Peter’s condition accurately. The Lindens had not discussed these with us—perhaps they found the subject too painful. Since this information was correct, there is no reason to suppose that the impressions concerning the disease’s causes were wrong, though they are unknown. By the same token, there is no reason to suppose the reincarnational material was any less correct, though we can’t check it because of the long time periods involved. (Some reincarnational data is much more recent and can be checked to some extent if the people involved have the time and want to make the effort. So far we have run across very few priests, and no one else who lived in Atlantis.)

“He wanted to remarry, but no one would have him because of the daughter. When she could, she defied him. She was a handsome-looking young woman, crippled but not deformed. When she was in her thirties, she was more youthful appearing than many women much younger who had to work in the fields. They had a small farm, and itinerant help. A widowed man with no children came from a nearby village to help out on the farm. He fell in love with her, and despite her condition, took her to his home village.

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.”

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?

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.