“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth had often told us that when we’re finished with our lives here, we’re actually anxious to leave this existence. When the body is worn out, we really want to get rid of it. The instinct for survival is served quite well, because the inner self knows that it lives beyond death. Still, I hated to say this to Jon over the phone. In theory it sounded fine, but naturally I knew he wanted Sally to live. I knew that he hoped for some miracle—at least a partial recovery, a reprieve.

I did promise to hold a Seth session for him, and later I was glad I did. Not only was the session a help to Jon, but it contains some excellent information on what can go on while a person is supposedly unconscious, in coma, and what we experience just before and after death.

Again, at the time of the session Sally was in deep coma. She hadn’t been able to speak for over a year. First Seth gave a page or so of impressions, names, initials, events, and so forth, that he said he “derived from a certain portion of the girl’s consciousness—disjointed memories, thoughts, and ideas.

“Shortly, training periods will begin. It will be her turn now to help others and be their source of strength. She has already begun a new life, therefore [Seth does not mean another physical life here, of course], though presently her experience is being monitored to some degree by guides.

(Later we thought that this last statement had extremely provocative implications for cases in which visions of religious figures are reported. We hope Seth will discuss this more thoroughly in the future.)

During our break, Rob mentioned several questions that he thought Jon would like answered, or that might come to his mind as he read the session. One had to do with the kind of body Sally had at her disposal. Seth said, “Now the new body is, of course, not a new one at all, but simply a body not physical in your terms, one that you use in astral projections, one that gives the vitality and strength to the physical body that you know.

A few days after this session we were visited by a retired minister and his wife. Rev. Lowe, as I’ll call him, publishes a national newsletter which discusses the psychic elements of Christianity. We had been corresponding for a few years, but had not met. I told him about Jon’s session, and he was very interested in what Seth had to say about Sally’s experience while in coma.

I had no idea whether or not Seth would come through that night. In the beginning, I’d jokingly introduced the minister as a rock drummer, to put both him and the class at ease. Someone commented that the presence of a minister must have quieted everyone down, since no one was saying much.

Suddenly Seth came through, saying: “And I thought you were on your good behavior because I was here! I will have to learn to be a reverend rock drummer, and I will keep the beat with you.” After this he spoke to various class members, and then invited Rev. Lowe to ask whatever questions came to his mind.

“You go where you want to go,” Seth said. “Now, when your ordinary, waking, conscious mind is lulled in the sleep state, you travel in other dimensions. You are already having experiences in these other dimensions then. You are preparing your own way. When you die you go into those ways that you have prepared. There are various periods of training that vary according to the individual.

Rev. Lowe asked other questions but no more relating to the subject at hand. He and Seth seemed to get along very well. Later, in a break, I received several impressions of a past life of Mrs. Lowe’s. While a general discussion was going on, I “saw” her near a riding academy in fourteenth-century France; and then I saw her and Rev. Lowe as twins in Greece, when he was an orator and she a soldier. There were other details, but the interesting thing was that Mrs. Lowe told me afterward that she was really crazy about horses, and that Greece and France were the only countries in which she had any great interest.

Seth rarely gives reincarnational data unless it is directly tied in with the overall development of an individual’s present life, and he refuses to give past life histories, for example, to those he thinks will not apply the lessons involved. Strangely enough, he did give such information once in a class to three college girls who clearly did not believe in reincarnation to begin with. They had just begun classes, and while they were curious about ESP, they had little patience with the theory of reincarnation—before the session, that is.

The girls were all intelligent, bright, alert—and wary. They weren’t about to be taken in by any mumbo jumbo. At the same time they were intensely interested in Seth’s ideas that consciousness can be expanded safely and without drugs, using his methods. One girl, Lydia, was the most vocal of the group in her arguments against reincarnation.

“You will reincarnate whether or not you believe that you will,” Seth began, smiling. “It is much easier if your theories fit reality, but if they do not, then you do not change the nature of reincarnation one iota.” He went on to give Lydia a rather detailed description of a past life around the area of Bangor, Maine, in 1832, when she was a male. This was Lydia’s first Seth session and she sat wiggling nervously in her chair as Seth gave names, dates, and particular episodes of this past life.

When he was finished, she said, “Well, I don’t know what to say, but I’ll tell you this. The crazy thing is that I spent my childhood in Bangor, Maine, and when we moved to New York State I wouldn’t give New York as my home. I always felt that I belonged in Maine. And Seth said that—” She broke off, and read her notes. Then she said excitedly, “Seth said that a Miranda Charbeau from the French side of my family in that past life married into the Franklin Bacon family of Boston. Again, it’s crazy, it really is, because my family this time is connected with the Roger Bacon family from Boston.”

There was no time for more discussion though, because Seth now began to speak to Jean, the most psychically gifted of the group:

“There was death by fire on two occassions.” Following this statement Seth gave details from an Irish life of Jean’s in 1524. Then he went on to give the following data, which we found most interesting. I’ll give it exactly as we received it, though it was somewhat confusing in the beginning, since Seth just jumped into it.

When Seth was done, for a minute, Jean wouldn’t say a thing. Then she really blushed and told us that she’d always been terrified of fire, and that her nickname in high school had been Joan of Arc or The Witch.

But Seth wasn’t through. He gave reincarnational material for another student, Connie, and mentioned in particular a life in Denmark when she had died as a small boy of diphtheria. And that really did it! Connie surprised everyone, particularly the other college girls, by saying that since she was a small child she’d been frightened of getting diphtheria, and that she could never understand why.

So along with the reincarnational histories Seth had given each girl a point of information, highly significant, and unknown to anyone in the room except for the person for whom it was intended. And this bit of information tied in beautifully with some small unexplainable attitudes that had previously puzzled them. Suddenly they were quite interested in reincarnation, and as usual, their minds were trigger-fast. Now they wanted to know everything at once.

“Seth said earlier that all time existed at once,” said Jean. “Then how come he talks about reincarnational lives or a series of lives one before the other? The two don’t seem to go together.”

Almost immediately, Seth came through and answered her question.

Actually Seth has used several analogies to explain reincarnational experiences. On page 3,600 of our own sessions I find this: “The various reincarnational selves can be superficially regarded as portions of a crossword puzzle, for they are all portions of the whole, and yet they can exist separately.”

In fact, Seth gave three or four sessions in which he compared cases of “split” personalities to our reincarnation selves. He ended up by saying, “It is interesting that the personalities [in Three Faces of Eve] did alternate, and all were in existence at once, so to speak, even though only one was dominant at any given time. In the same way, so-called past personalities are present in you now but not dominant.”

As far as we know, this reconciliation of reincarnation and simultaneous time is original with Seth. Most other theories of reincarnation take the time sequence for granted. But what about cause and effect, then? When Seth introduced this idea, this is one of the first questions Rob and I thought of. Seth’s attitude toward cause and effect will become clear enough in his later explanations of the true nature of “time,” but when Rob first asked the question, Seth answered:

So while Seth often explains present life problems as the result of past life difficulties, he makes it clear to those that can understand that the lives really exist simultaneously, just as three personalities can exist in one body at one time. But all problems are not the result of such “past life” influences. In one case, a friend’s hang-ups in the present originated right in this life, though her boyfriend’s were left over from the past.

Finally after the breakup of one such episode, she asked for a Seth session. She knows both of us well, so I was quite astonished at her behavior before the session. She was so uptight that I found it difficult to go into trance. She just sat there, really white-faced, unsmiling, looking quite terrified.

Seth began by saying gently, “Your feelings toward me are connected with other attitudes deeply ingrained within you. You have been afraid of your father since infancy. Now you think of me as an old but wise, extremely powerful male adult, as you thought of your father when you were a child. This attitude overshadows your relationship with the males with whom you come into contact.

From what Rob said later, Doris sat there red-faced and somewhat embarrassed. Our tape recorder was on. Seth went on citing examples from Doris’ early life of which Rob and I knew nothing. The entire session took up nine pages of single-typed copy, in which Seth analyzed Doris’ attitudes and traits, illustrating them with specific episodes formerly known only to her, and ending up with some excellent advice.

He told her that she was projecting this image upon each male she met, and then reacting to it instead of to the individual. He gave her some mental exercises calculated to help her dissolve this false image. Here Doris began to cry a little. Seth smiled and said, “Now, now, do not sniffle. I am not your father giving you an arithmetic lesson. I put myself out to help you, and for this I get tears. I usually do not have that effect on people.”

Seth went on to say that in this life, Frank chose to return as the son of the two brothers who themselves are now man and wife. “Now he rationalizes his desire not to leave home. The brothers never held him responsible … they knew the girl had been terrified and spoken out of fear with no intent to betray them. There is no punishment involved. He has chosen in this life to be of service to them and to help others. His secrecy [he was very tight-lipped] is the result of these past experiences. Once he feels he spoke too much and betrayed too much. Now he is secretive about matters he considers important.”

Seth emphasized that for his own reasons, Frank did not want a marriage relationship, and ended by telling Doris that she had chosen him for this reason—that she never saw the man as he was, but only the image she had projected upon him. He gave Frank’s name in a past life as Achman incidentally, and much later Doris learned that his present family has an Achman branch.

Much more psychological advice was given. The whole session was of great help to Doris—who hasn’t been frightened of Seth since, by the way! But it is an oversimplificaton to say that all present problems are the result of past life difficulties. We are not “stuck” with our problems, whether they come from this life or another. We don’t have to drag them along with us. They can be solved, and while reincarnational influences certainly operate, they don’t operate in a vacuum. The following chapter on health will contain some of Seth’s methods for maintaining mental, psychic, and physical vitality—and perspective.

An editor I’ll call Matt came to visit us from New York. We had corresponded but never met before. He had read a manuscript of mine and knew about Seth. We liked each other at once, but it was primarily a business meeting. And then, I felt that Matt would want me to “prove my abilities” somehow or other, and I didn’t want to feel under pressure.

Seth had previously given us some information about Matt, his publishing company, and his associates. And the next evening, when we were all more comfortable with each other, Seth came through and held an excellent session.

Matt has since become a good friend, incidentally, but at that point we didn’t know him from Adam. The psychological insights shown were really astonishing—and I don’t believe that the most accomplished psychologist could have pinpointed this young man’s character, abilities, and liabilities as well as Seth did.

My eyes were open during much of the session—my physical eyes, that is, because at such times they are definitely mirrors of a different personality. “There has been a sense of a void to be filled,” Seth began. “A fear of identity escaping and running outward. My cup runneth over, and there will be none of me left—you see? On the other hand it has always been natural for the personality to turn outward in an easy manner and with exuberance.

At this, Rob and Matt both burst out laughing. Then Seth went into some information, connecting some of the young man’s present interests with past activities. He mentioned several past lives, but emphasized one as being particularly significant. “You were a member of a monastic group who classified and collected various kinds of seeds. The group worked on manuscripts officially, but our friend here and several others were bootleg seed finders, believing against currently held theories that questions concerning nature could be answered by examining nature.

At this point, as Seth talked I seemed to be looking down on the scene he described. I watched the monk from some point behind and above, as he wandered away from the monastery and through the fields. Seth went on to say that the monk’s experiments contributed to achievements made later in the same field by another monk.

Matt, for instance, was astonished by the character analysis which he said pegged him to a T. More, the crest mentioned by Seth was highly similiar, he told us, to his own private doodle that he sketched while on the phone or in odd moments. Another interesting point: a few years earlier the editor had written two plays—one featuring a monk who lived on the seacoast near Bordeaux, and the other also set in France in the thirteenth century. These facts, of course, were unknown to us.

We did know that the editor was interested in botany, however, and Seth tied in this avocation with the past experimental work done with seeds.

I’ve tried, through excerpts from readings, to show Seth’s ideas on reincarnation as they are personally applied. But there are several important questions we haven’t considered as yet. For example, how many lives do we live? Is there a limit to them? Quite simply, we live as many physical existences as we feel we must in order to develop our abilities and prepare ourselves to enter other dimensions of reality. This will be discussed thoroughly in the chapter dealing with the nature of personality.

Within this framework of development, however, there is a minimum requirement. Seth says: “As a rule, each entity is born so that three roles are experienced—that of mother, father, and child. Two lives would be sufficient to give you the three roles, but in some cases the personality does not function to adulthood. The most important issue, however, is the fullest use of potential.”

Seth also told us that some personalities do not develop well in the physical environment, but fulfill themselves in other realities. In other words, the “last” reincarnation is not the end. There are other dimensions of existence in which we have an even greater part to play in the maintenance of life and consciousness. These dimensions, and our part in them, will be explained along with the God concept, probabilities, and time. But central to Seth’s discussions of reincarnation are the following excerpts from session 233 that place reincarnation in perspective, individually and historically.