“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?”

She insisted that a shower and quick supper would fix him up like new. We agreed that she and Jim would be at our apartment around eight.

“You wouldn’t want anything like that to happen again, would you?” Rob asked.

“Seth just wasn’t around,” I said. “If he had been, he probably would have given me the information, and I wouldn’t have had to go through all that.”

I said “Yes” in a sort of daze, and hung up. Rob was afraid that I’d feel under pressure, knowing that they were driving such a long way and back the same night for a session. I’d explained to Ann that I could give her no guarantee of any kind as to what would happen. Purposely I put the matter out of my mind and watched television during the early evening. Then to top it off, at about eight Phil dropped in, explaining that he was in town for the night and would like to attend a session!

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 …

“He was a light to you, and the light is not extinguished. It will lead you into knowledge that you would not have known otherwise, for you would not have sought it so vigorously. He is well aware of this, and wanted you to begin the pilgrimage; but the pilgrimage is within yourselves.”

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.”

He suggested that Jim stay out of the acting field, because in his case it led to a confusion as to the nature of his own identity. Seth advised him to stay with communications, saying that if he continued in radio there would be another radio job, and then an emergence into another line of work.

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.

“I’m sure Seth could help,” Jon said. “I knew it as soon as I read your book. Even if Sally can’t be cured, perhaps he could explain things so that her illness would make some kind of sense. Why Sally? She’s never hurt anyone in her life.”

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.

He recommended that Sally’s limbs be rubbed with peanut oil, and that iron be added to her diet. He emphasized that she would be happier in another room and said: “I believe you have a fairly small sunny parlor. This room has beneficial connotations for her. Let her be moved there.” In passing he spoke of several episodes in Sally’s present life, some that Jon corroborated in his next letter, and one in particular that he did not know about until Seth mentioned it. Seth said, for example, that she had worked in a five-and-dime store with a girl friend, and that a visit from this friend would be helpful. Jon didn’t know that Sally had worked in such a place, but her mother remembered.

“He wanted to remarry, but no one would have him because of the daughter. When she could, she defied him. She was a handsome-looking young woman, crippled but not deformed. When she was in her thirties, she was more youthful appearing than many women much younger who had to work in the fields. They had a small farm, and itinerant help. A widowed man with no children came from a nearby village to help out on the farm. He fell in love with her, and despite her condition, took her to his home village.

“The father [Sally in the past life] was thoroughly embittered. The daughter had left too late; he was too old; no one would have him, and now he had no one even to talk to. He hated his daughter the more and railed that she had forsaken him in his old age, after he had cared for her.”

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.”

“Such a situation allows the personality to telescope experience needed into one life situation, to delve deeply and face at once problems that could otherwise take several lifetimes. Only a bold and courageous personality would attempt this.”