“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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?”

Why do some children die young—particularly gifted children with devoted parents? I don’t believe that there can be any single answer or blanket explanation, but we have had two readings involving such children, and I can give you the explanations offered in these specific instances.

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.

“Uh huh,” I said, and the details of that last episode rushed into consciousness once more. It had been a bright sunny Saturday afternoon several months earlier. I was in jeans, housecleaning, when a student called. She had a particularly knotty problem and she wanted me to try to contact her deceased mother-in-law. The student had been to only a few classes, and her mother-in-law lived and died in Florida. I didn’t know her family at all.

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.”

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.”

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.