“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.

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.

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.”

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 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.

Actually, it was kind of funny: Matt knocked himself out to show me that I didn’t really have to prove a thing! So for a while our conversation was rather bright and frantic.

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.