“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Before we discuss other varieties of health and illness as they more ordinarily appear, I want to bring up the subject of more or less extraordinary conditions — dilemmas of body or mind in early life that often seem to have no cause or meaning.

In a basic way, it is possible for present beliefs to actually modify the beliefs of a life that is seemingly a past one. I must explain again that all lives are lived at once — but in different kinds of focuses. Your conventional ideas of time make it simpler, however, to speak of one life as happening before or after another.

Again, no one is punished for crimes committed in a past life, and in each life you are unique. The inner intelligence within you that gives you each life also gives you the conditions of each life. It certainly seems to you, or to many of you, that most people would always choose to be born healthy and whole, in an excellent environment, of parents with loving natures and genetic excellence — and in other words to grow up healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Life, however, is far too profound and multitudinous, and requires great depths of emotional response and action that could never be satisfied adequately by any given set of circumstances, however favorable.

In some lives, then, you are born in fortunate circumstances, and in others you may find an environment of poverty and want. You may be born in excellent health in one life, with a high intelligence and great wit, while in still another existence you may be born ill or crippled or mentally deficient.

These are all part of the continuous undercurrents of life, and the same issues apply to many other species whose offspring are lost in very early life.

This is not an uncaring universe or nature operating, but portions of consciousness who choose at whatever levels certain experiences that nourish the living environment, and bring satisfactions that may never show on life’s surface.

The child may go from one illness to another, or simply display an odd disinclination for life — a lack of enthusiasm, until finally in some cases the child dies at an early age. Another individual, under the same circumstances, might change its mind and decide to go along with the experience of normal life.