“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Give us a moment. (Long pause.) The chart of events at the time of your “birth” is like one small snapshot of someone’s backyard in the afternoon. Here in this analogy, the entire earthly personality could be compared to the world. Now as long as you make your deductions according to that one picture, there will be correlations that apply — but only to that small specific area.

(10:31. Jane was out of her very excellent trance at once. “That was one of those times when the material was coming through so great that I could have continued until morning. That feeling of freedom is fantastic,” she said, then tried an analogy: “I’m as free as a great runner who breaks a world record when her chest hits the tape….”

I think it very likely that aborted fetuses and those infants who die early in “life” — say within a few months after birth, especially — never intended to stay long within camouflage (physical) reality to begin with; the consciousnesses within those small human structures came just to momentarily sample our world of matter, whether from inside the womb or out of it. Considering their viewpoints, it’s not tragic that they “die” unborn, or at such young ages, although in ordinary terms the parents involved will almost certainly mourn deeply. (Perhaps these notions will be of some limited comfort to those who have written us with related questions.)

Of course, these ideas would apply to any form of life as we ordinarily think of that quality. They would be a commonplace in the animal world, for instance; witness the quick deaths of certain newborn kittens in a litter (as Jane and I have); or consider the puppy in an animal shelter, or pound, certain to be put to death in a few days if no one gives it a home. The young dog won’t live long, yet I think that in its own way it must understand that great “risk”; for specific reasons its consciousness decided upon its brief look into temporal reality. (This kind of thinking usually reminds me of a certain statement Seth made half a dozen years ago; see Note 7 for Session 727: “Creatures without the compartment of the ego can easily follow their own identity beyond any change of form.”)

On a more personal level, Jane herself naturally aborted a three-month-old fetus, less than a year after our marriage in 1954 (and nine years before she initiated these sessions). Seth has said very little about this event, nor have we asked him to. He did remark some time ago in a private session that the miscarriage spontaneously came about because the personality inhabiting the fetus “changed its mind,” and withdrew from the physical world. At some indefinite date we do plan to invite Seth to discuss the whole situation in detail.