“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Individuals who defy death time and time again are actually more frightened of it than most other people are. Trapeze performers, stunt men and women, race-car riders, and many other groups have a life-style that includes death-defying stunts on a very regular basis.

Trapeze performers may have several acts a day, for example. It seems that such individuals perform with great daring, even with a rashness that is unfamiliar to most people. Most such performers, however, are extremely regulated. They work with a carefully calculated eye, under conditions in which each detail, however minute, is of supreme importance. No matter how often certain trapeze acts may be repeated, for example, there is always the threat of instant disaster — of missed footing, a final plunge. Through testing “fate,” death-defiers try each time they perform to prove to themselves that they are indeed safe, that they can overcome life’s most dire conditions. Period.

Life, then, has the sweetest buoyancy, the greatest satisfaction, because it is contrasted with the ever-present threat of death. Many such people do not feel at all safe living under life’s usual conditions. They protect themselves by setting up the conditions of such an encounter, and controlling those conditions, again down to the smallest detail.

(Long pause at 4:16.) Only when they pursue some death-defying career do such individuals feel safe enough to relax otherwise and live a fairly normal life outside of their death-defying careers.

This need not be the case, of course. Self-understanding and self-knowledge may be able to change the individuals’ lives for the better, regardless of their activities or conditions of life. It is true that these individuals do choose for themselves a carefully planned and regulated style of life, in which the threat of death is encountered personally and regularly; each day becomes an odyssey, in which death and life are purposefully weighed. Period.

If people become ill, it is quite fashionable to say that the immunity system (Seth’s pronunciation) has temporarily failed — yet the body itself knows that certain “dis-eases” are healthy reactions. The body does not regard diseases as diseases, in usually understood terms. It regards all activity as experience, as a momentary condition of life (pause), as a balancing situation. But it possesses a sense of wholeness and of overall integrity, for it knows that it continues to exist, though under different conditions, and it realizes that this change is as natural and necessary as the change of seasons if each individual is to continue to exist, while the earth itself possesses the nutriments necessary to the survival of physical life.