“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.

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?”

“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.

If it was subconscious role-taking on my part, then it was a darned good job, and if telepathy was involved, then it was a darned good job too, because my student had to check some of the facts with others. But I didn’t like it, and I didn’t want anything like it to happen again. I’m pretty choosy as to whom I let in my house, and living or dead, people like that weren’t going to find a welcome mat here.

I knew Rob was right, though: Some self-protection is necessary on my part. Besides the mother-in-law episode, there had been a few other upsetting ones involving emotional situations I’d “picked up” from living people. In any case, when I can get such excellent material from Seth, it seems that my primary responsibility lies in that direction. All of these feelings were in the back of my mind that night, when Jim and Ann came.

“Brooklyn?” I nearly dropped the phone. “I thought you meant that your husband was in New York for the day, but that you lived here—”

That’s the last thing I remember saying as myself. The next moment Seth’s deep booming voice came rushing through me: “The boy was briefly with you for his own reasons. He was to enlighten you, and so he did. You have known him in past lives. At one time, he was his present father’s uncle.

“He wanted to give you an impetus, and his effect was far stronger than had he lived, and he knew this. He had a horror of living to young malehood for he did not want to meet a young woman, become attracted, and continue with another physical life.

“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.”

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.”

Seth went on to give an analysis of Jim’s present personality as it was connected with events from past lives, and to give him some advice about the future. Jim told us earlier that he had been a disc jockey. Now Seth said, “No one can tell you what road to follow. You have the answers within you. Beware of those who give you ready answers. I am speaking in terms of probabilities, for the future is plastic.”

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.”

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.)

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.

Here is how this process works in a specific instance. Again, a phone call was involved, this time from a man I’ll call Jon who called me from another part of the country, right after my first book was published two years ago. Jon and his wife were both in their early twenties. I’ll call his wife Sally. After coming down with multiple sclerosis, Sally had been given about a year to live, and Jon wanted to ask Seth if anything could be done for her.

Seth also said that he would outline a program designed to change Sally’s own expectations, and also suggested treatment by an accredited hypnotist who could instill positive suggestions to rouse her will to live.

The second session for Jon was entirely devoted to reincarnational influences, and it is an excellent example of the way these can affect health patterns. The session also contains some general advice and answers some specific questions applying to the relationship between past lives and present health.

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?