“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Experiments would be set up in advance of the death of either Jane or I, Seth said, that would furnish this convincing proof once one of us died. I am nine years older than Jane. Seth went on to say that once this proof was made known and accepted, it would change the behavior of every man on earth, for man would have to live his physical life in the face of knowledge of an afterlife.

(The Gallaghers left shortly after this. Jane was upset, so upset that at first she couldn’t let Seth through, even though she wanted to. I urged her to sit quietly, smoke a cigarette, and relax. In view of earlier material I remembered, I thought the 67th- year information was a distortion, and that such a distortion was natural enough when one talked about one’s own passing. I also thought that all such predictions, whether favorable or not, depended upon probabilities, in line with the latest material we have been getting. I should add here that the 105th session dealt with the death of Jane’s mother, as well as Jane living to an advanced age. The mother’s death has not yet occurred, Seth saying that the information was by way of allowing Jane to prepareherself for the shock of her mother’s death. The subject had been brought up by severalvivid dreams and psychological time experiences Jane had had concerning her mother. While giving this 105th session, Seth had also had trouble getting the information through, ascribing the difficulty to Jane’s ego. See Volume 3.

(Tonight, Jane then went on to foresee her own death at 67. This naturally surprised us. Seth prefaced this by saying something about “I see a breathing difficulty.” He went on to say that Ruburt was upset at this information, and that her relatively early death simply meant she had to work harder in this life. According to Seth this is the last physical life for Jane and me. Seth said he was having trouble getting this information through.

(This led rather naturally into a discussion of ages. Seth then told Bill he saw him living until around 85, with Peggy equally old. Seth then told me I would live to be 87. This is the first time he has given me any specific age, although in several previous sessions, among them the 149th and the 217th, he has mentioned my living to an old age. In the 105th session, among others, he stated that Jane’s death was not “to occur for many years.” In our immediately past lives, spent mainly in Boston in pre-Civil War days, Jane lived to be 82 or 83 as a woman medium, and I lived to be 63 as an Episcopalian minister. We have received a limited amount of data on the Boston lives, and are not sure of our personal relationship, except that we were not man and wife. See Volume 4, for example.

[...] It is a triumph of spiritual and psychological identity, ever choosing from a myriad of probable realities its own clear unassailable focus (very intently). When you don’t realize this, then you project upon life after death all of the old misconceptions. You expect the dead to be little different from the living — if you believe in afterlife at all — but perhaps more at peace, more understanding, and, hopefully, wiser.

[...] Jane Roberts’s husband, Robert Butts, wondered about the death of his mother (on November 19, 1973). In a session (the 679th for February 4, 1974) he brought out some old photographs. Now: Life after death has usually been described quite in keeping with the old accepted ideas about one self, and limited concepts of personhood. [...]

(Pause at 11:51 — then with much emphasis.) The fact is that in life you poise delicately and yet perfectly between realities, and after death you do the same. I used the opportunity, then, to explain the great freedom available to Robert Butts’s mother after death — but also to explain those elements of her reality present during life that had been closed to him consciously because of mankind’s concepts about the nature of the psyche. [...]

[...] It would be easy to think that the dream foresaw Joseph’s own death, and that of his brother and sister-in-law. [...] To it, your death has already occurred, from your standpoint. [...]

[...] Death is a physical reality. [...] If you accept those terms as the only criterion of reality then surely it appears that death is an end to your consciousness.

You may believe in an afterlife to some extent or another, or you may or may not be convinced by the general theory of reincarnation. [...]

[...] But while you are physical, you will still experience birth and death, dawn and dusk, and the privacy of the moments, for this is the experience you have chosen.

[...] You did not have, in the past life, any idea of joy connected with religion, however, the cross being then a symbol of death, leading to a Puritan afterlife.

[...] For your private information, middle or late March… I do not know whether this is the woman’s death (open eyes, pointing at me), but it is an event involving death of a woman (gestures) close to the wife, you see?

The dream of which the man spoke to Ruburt had some clairvoyant elements in it, but the time of the woman’s death is not in the immediate (underlined) future.

I will not give him any date, or approximate date, for his wife’s death. [...]

[...] Again, a future life presupposes death in the present one. That idea of death usually serves as an effective block against such future explorations.

[...]

I would make clear the nature and conditions in which I now have my existence, and explain some of the reasons for the various, often contradictory, statements made concerning life after death. Statements received by various mediums, in which quite different pictures of afterlife reality are received.

[...] I had many death days, but I do not have those now either.

“I would make clear the nature and conditions in which I now have my existence, and explain some of the reasons for the often contradictory statements made concerning life after death—statements received by various mediums in which quite different pictures of afterlife reality are received.

As human beings we live suspended between life and death. [...] But animals, as far as we know, do not anticipate their own death, or wonder about their status before birth. [...]

[...] “No, if we could do all that, we’d know when we were going to die!” But suppose we saw beyond the point of death, discovering to our surprise that we were still conscious—not only of ourselves as we “were” but of other portions of ourselves of which we had been unaware? [...]

Organized religion professes to hold the opposite idea, that man’s identity is independent of physical matter—after death. [...]

Many people, of course, feel that death is a new beginning, but most of us still think that we are formed and bound by our physical bodies and environment. Many who believe in an afterlife think that current events are thrust upon us indiscriminately. [...]

[...] Others see the universe as a sort of theater into which we are thrust at birth and from which we depart forever at death. In the backs of their minds people with either attitude will see a built-in threat in each new day; even joy will be suspect because it, too, must end in the body’s eventual death.

[...] When I fell in love with Rob, my joy served to double the underlying sense of tragedy I felt, as if death mocked me all the more by making life twice as precious. [...]

Seth says that not only do we form our own reality now, but we will continue to do so after physical death, so it is of the utmost importance that we understand the connection between thought and reality.

The next chapter will deal with existence after death, with its many variations. Both of these chapters will bear on reincarnation as it applies to death, and some emphasis will also be given to death at the end of the last incarnation.

The next chapter will deal with the experience of any personality at the point of death, and with the many variations on this basic adventure. I will use some of my own deaths as examples.

[...] Actually what we object to is the conventional idea of a spirit, which is an extension of quite limited ideas of human personality, only projected more or less intact into an afterlife. [...]