“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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?”

What can you say in a situation like that? I wanted to help. I felt their terrific need, but I also realized that it was well-nigh impossible to prove life after death. Suppose I contacted the boy, or thought I had? How would this help? Instead of making them face the facts of his separation, couldn’t such an incident simply make things worse? And my own doubts rose: if subconscious playacting were involved …

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.

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.

“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.

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.