“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.

“He did not mean to stay within physical reality. He only came to show you what was possible, and to bring you both to an understanding of inner reality. He chose his illness. It was not thrust upon him. He did not manufacture sufficient blood, for he did not want to be physical beyond the time he had allotted.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

“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.”

“The problem is a challenge set up by the entity for one of its own personalities, but the outcome is up to the personality involved. This was the last major stumbling block for this personality. … One does not choose illness per se for a lifetime situation. In this case, in order for the personality to see its own past activities clearly, it felt that it must develop a position of complete dependency.”