“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As mentioned earlier, all through your lifetime, portions of that body die, and the body that you have now does not contain one particle of physical matter that “it” had, say ten years ago. Your body is completely different now, then, than it was ten years ago. The body that you had ten years ago, my dear readers, is dead. Yet obviously you do not feel that you are dead, and you are quite able to read this book with the eyes that are composed of completely new matter. The pupils, the “identical” pupils that you have now, did not exist ten years ago, and yet there seems to be no great gap in your vision.

What happens at the point of death? The question is much more easily asked than answered. Basically there is not any particular point of death in those terms, even in the case of a sudden accident. I will attempt to give you a practical answer to what you think of as this practical question, however. What the question really means to most people is this: What will happen when I am not alive in physical terms any longer? What will I feel? Will I still be myself? Will the emotions that propelled me in life continue to do so? Is there a heaven or a hell? Will I be greeted by gods or demons, enemies, or beloved ones? Most of all the question means: When I am dead, will I still be who I am now, and will I remember those who are dear to me now?

First of all, let us consider the fact just mentioned. There is no separate, indivisible, specific point of death. Life is a state of becoming, and death is a part of this process of becoming. You are alive now, a consciousness knowing itself, sparkling with cognition amid a debris of dead and dying cells; alive while the atoms and molecules of your body die and are reborn. You are alive, therefore, in the midst of small deaths; portions of your own image crumble away moment by moment and are replaced, and you scarcely give the matter a thought. So you are to some extent now alive in the midst of the death of yourself — alive despite, and yet because of, the multitudinous deaths and rebirths that occur within your body in physical terms.

In many ways you can compare your consciousness as you know it now to a firefly, for while it seems to you that your consciousness is continuous, this is not so. It also flickers off and on, though as we mentioned earlier, it is never completely extinguished. Its focus is not nearly as constant as you suppose, however. So as you are alive in the midst of your own multitudinous small deaths, so though you do not realize it, you are often “dead,” even amid the sparkling life of your own consciousness.

[...] Ruburt has been playing dead. His ideas convinced the body that playing dead was the way to insure overall survival. [...]

Some people play dead mentally or emotionally. Some play dead in a very specific manner, deadening certain organs. [...]

[...] Under some conditions animals in perfect condition will play dead, or otherwise immobilize themselves. [...]

[...] When an animal is playing dead it knows when the immediate danger is over. [...]

[...] But certainly most of you are united in the seemingly irrefutable belief that you are definitely alive now, and not dead. Dead people do not read books. [...]

(Amused:) On the other hand, dead people do not usually write books either — now do they?

[...] In greater terms, you are alive and dead at the same time, even as I am. [...]

[...] His parents, known to be dead, were there. [...]

(“How many years have you been dead, Frank Watts?”)

(“Is your wife alive or dead?”)

Dead.

Dead.

[...] Each body contains countless viruses that could be deadly at any given time and under certain conditions. [...] Viruses that are “deadly” in certain stages are not in others, and in those later stages they react biologically in quite beneficial ways, adding to the body’s stability by bringing about necessary changes, say, in cellular activities that are helpful at given rates of action. [...]

[...] When he returned he found Billy dead in his cage. [...]

[...] At once Jane and I named them Billy Two and Mitzi: Billy Two, obviously, because he was also a tiger cat and bore a strong resemblance to the dead Billy; Mitzi because with her longer, black and white fur she at once reminded me of the Mitzi who’d belonged to the Butts’s next-door neighbors when I was a child. [...]

[...] Belladonna can be quite deadly, yet small doses of it were known to aid the body in disease conditions.³

Some dead friends and relatives do visit you, projecting from their own level of reality into yours, but you cannot as a rule perceive their forms. They are not more ghostly, or “dead,” however, than you are when you project into their reality — as you do, from the sleep state.

[...] The length of time an individual has been dead in your terms has little to do with whether or not you will be so visited, but rather the intensity of the relationship.

As mentioned earlier, however, in the sleep state you may help recently dead persons, complete strangers, to acclimate to after-death conditions, even though this knowledge is not available to you in the morning. [...]

[...] You may look back upon it and think it a dead image of yourself, you see. Some individuals in their first astral form see their physical bodies as dead images of themselves and become frightened.

[...] Many of you do, while projecting, council and help those who are newly dead in physical terms.

[...] Now there are classes indeed where the newly dead are instructed. [...]

[...] There are no dead-end projections.

[...] I said little to Jane, but I was most uneasy that she was delivering material supposedly from a member of the famous dead. [...] Not that mediums, or others, couldn’t communicate with the “dead” — but to us, anyhow, exhibitions involving well-known personages usually seem … psychologically tainted. [...]

[...] She’d always refused to try to “reach the dead” in this way before. [...] We were also quite aware of the humorous aspects of the situation, since Jane does speak for at least one of the “dead”: Seth. [...]

(Long pause at 11:30.) The most legitimate instances of communication between the living and the dead occur in an intimate personal framework, in which a dead parent makes contact with its offspring⁹: or a husband or wife freshly out of physical reality appears to his or her mate. [...]

10. I’d like to dwell a bit upon a point I made in the opening notes for this (718th) session, when I wrote about mediums, or others, contacting the well-known dead. I mean it kindly — but Jane and I have never believed that a living individual could be in contact with a famous dead person; especially through the Ouija board or automatic writing. [...]

[...] May have been a grandmother, possibly now dead.

[...] This means he is now an old man now or is dead. [...]

A mother who… Dropped dead at 35, or something happened drastically to change her, no, died at number 35, or had a psychological tragedy. [...]

[...] May have been a Grandmother, possibly now dead. [...]

[...] This means he is now an old man now or is dead. [...]

[...] dropped dead at 35, or something happened drastically to change her. [...]

[...] Nothing can be drawn through the dead hole, though, as things can be drawn through the black hole, because of [the dead hole’s] literally impenetrable mass. [...] The slower center portions of the dead holes themselves move backward into beginnings becoming heavier and heavier.”

[...] The dead hole is repeated in microscopic size — that’s small, isn’t it? Before the emergence of the atom … oh, dear … as an analogy, you could say that the dead hole we’ve been talking about emerges as an atom in another universe. [...]

[...] Because of our ordinary time sense the sounds were actually so slow to us that they appeared to be motionless, or “dead,” she told me, leading us to speculate that this may be one of the reasons why in usual terms we call inanimate matter — rocks, for instance — “dead.” [...]

[...] You can call it a dead hole” (Pause.) “Its motion in our terms is so slow as not to be observable, but in terms of time it’s a backward motion.”⁹

[...] You would not be caught dead with your consciousness outside your body. [...] But as long as you believe that it is, again, you will not be caught dead outside it. And when you are caught dead outside it there will be some amazement indeed. [...]

[...] I do not reassure you by telling you that when you are dead, God will be waiting for you in all His majestic mercy and that will be the end of your responsibility. [...]

[...] You would not be caught DEAD with your consciousness outside of your body. [...] Now the fact is that your consciousness is not imprisoned within your body; but as long as you believe that it is, again, you will not be caught dead outside of it. And when you are caught dead outside of it, there will be some amazement, indeed.

[...] I do not reassure you by telling you that when you are dead, God will be waiting for you in all his majestic mercy, and that that will be the end of your responsibility. [...]

In dreams you are so “dumb” that you believe there is a commerce between the living and the dead. You are so “irrational” as to imagine that you sometimes speak to parents who are dead. [...]

(Long pause.) Your dead relatives survive. [...]

[...] I have said this before in class: You are as dead now, and as alive, as you will ever be. In life you can be as dead as you think any corpse is — even, by contrast, far deader.

[...] Do you need an old dead thing like me to tell you what life is? [...]

[...] It is not a dead thing transmitted, since it has no meaning without personality and realization, and since it changes the personalities through whom it seems to flow. [...]

[...] Words on a printed page for example are not dead, nor are they merely inert symbols. [...]

Your own father (meaning mine) has been in contact with his relative recently dead (Alice Butts). [...]

[...] I know this refers to the belief in man’s sinful nature or deadly intent; when you believe that you end up with the assailant’s hand your own. [...]

It seems incredible to me that my wife, Jane Roberts, has been dead for more than thirteen months. [...]

I couldn’t believe it when I realized that my wife had been dead for a week. [...]

[...] By rights, I shouldn’t be mentioning it sequentially until I publish the two books that Jane and I had finished while she was hospitalized — then it would be all right to announce that she is dead! [...]

Now here’s the second of the metaphors I referred to earlier — those intuitive comparisons I searched out as I kept on trying to grasp that Jane is truly, temporally dead. [...]

[...] Shortly after he baptized Jesus, John was imprisoned by Herod Antipas in the fortress Machaerus, near the Dead Sea.

[...] The interpretation of scanty records, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, has given rise to debate, but it appears he was either Menahem ben Judah, who was killed in A.D. 66 in Jerusalem, or a nephew, who survived and succeeded him.)

[...] She hadn’t read anything about the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, although I’d explained a little about them to her at various times. [...]

[...] That the words are not dead, as indeed I am far from dead. [...]

Now when I speak to you as I have this evening, my purpose, my one and main purpose, is to let you sense the endless vitality that is mine, though you, in conventional terms, would designate me by some ridiculous word—survival personality, as Ruburt says, or “spirit” or “dead.” [...]