“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“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.

“He was involved in scientific endeavors both in Atlantis and Egypt, but he had no desire to continue those pursuits now. He had gone quite beyond them. You [Jim] were also involved with him in two past lives in the same relationship, and as priests you both were interested in the inner workings of the universe.”

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.”

I felt pretty humble when the whole thing was over. Jim and Ann were almost transformed, and before the session, I had been so dubious that I hesitated. (The thing is, when I consciously think in such a limited fashion, my intuitive inner self rises up and shows me that much more is involved than the ego. Actually I think that these abilities flow through us as the wind flows through the branches.) Ann wrote me a letter shortly after, telling me that she and Jim no longer felt the tremendous sorrow that had burdened them earlier.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.”