“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Your body is aware of the fact of its death at birth, and of its birth at its death, for all of its possibilities for action take place in the area between. Death is therefore as creative as birth, and as necessary for action and consciousness, in your terms.

[...] Each present moment of your experience is dependent upon the future as well as the past, your death as well as your birth. Your birth and your death are built in, so to speak, together, one implied in the other.

(Pause at 9:40.) It is not quite that simple, however, for you live in the midst of multitudinous small deaths and births all of the time, that are registered by the body and the psyche. [...]

[...] In your terms they emerge from the future and form the past, and are given vitality because of creative tension that exists between what you think of as your birth and your death.

[...] I can assure you that death is another beginning, and that when you are dead, you are not silenced. [...] Is this presence that you sense within this room, death?

[...] All action is change, for otherwise there would be a static universe, and then indeed death would be the end. [...]

[...] The grave is not the end, for such a noisy one as I never spoke with the lips of death.

[...] “I do speak in trance for a personality who claims to have survived death. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

The other event of which I spoke will occur first, but this does not mean that the wife’s death will immediately follow. [...]

[...] Such young people die of sickness or accident, but go to their deaths like children after a splendid day. In most instances they choose quick deaths.

EARLY INSTANCES OF DEATH OR DISEASE
IN RELATIONSHIP TO FURTHER
REINCARNATIONAL INFLUENCES

Next chapter: “Early Instances of Death or Disease in Relationship to Further Reincarnational Influences.”

[...] An understanding of these issues can greatly help throw light on the question of early deaths and diseases, and spontaneous abortions.

(10:41.) Personality changes whether it is within a body or outside of it, so you will change after death as you change before it. In those terms, it is ridiculous to insist upon remaining as you are now, after death. [...]

[...] Out of the reincarnational framework, there is no death as you think of it.

(10:50.) If you think, however, that the self as you know it is the end or summation of yourself, then you also imagine your soul to be a limited entity bounded by its present ventures in one life alone, to be judged accordingly after death on the performance of a few paltry years.

[...] However, those who choose such deaths want to die in terms of drama, in the middle of their activities, and are in a strange way filled with the exultant inner knowledge of life’s strength even at the point of death. [...]

That identification often brings about in death — but not always — an added acceleration of consciousness, and involves such individuals in a kind of “group death experience,” where all of the victims more or less embark into another level of reality “at the same time.”

[...] The stability of the planet rests upon such changes and alterations, even as the body’s stability is dependent upon, say, the birth and death of the cells.

[...] (Pause.) If there were no death, you would have to invent it (smile) — for the context of that selfhood would be as limited as the experience of a great sculptor given but one hunk of stone (with quiet dramatic emphasis).¹

You may wonder why so many forms of life would be involved in what might seem to be self-destructive behavior, often leading to death — but remember that no consciousness considers death an end or a disaster, but views it instead as a means to the continuation of corporeal and noncorporeal existence.

[...] She’d thought of death, but didn’t want to do that to me. [...]

[...] The individual chooses the time of death. [...]

[...] Also, that we’ve gotten out of touch with our own feelings about death, and are afraid of it. [...]

In the first dream Ruburt remembered his earlier death. [...] He was not, then, afraid of death, knowing its true nature, and in the surrounding rooms there were other old people. Two in particular were men, dreadfully afraid of death, and both dying of cancer.

[...] She was a medium, and she passed from life to death with a smooth transition, continuing her work almost without interruption after death. [...]

The dream sequence for that group of days involved perception, first, of Ruburt’s actual previous death, and then leaped that same evening back further to much earlier events. The purpose of the whole sequence was reassuring, and in overall nature had to do with the personality’s inner reaction to the season of an approaching winter and the ever symbolic death that it suggests.

This dream is a sequel to another, in which Ruburt was aware of the death of an old woman who was a medium, and I will need to explain the first dream, that is the earlier one, to make the other dream comprehensible.

On one level the deaths are a protest against the time in which they occur. [...] The reasons, of course, vary from one individual to another, yet all involved “want their death to serve a purpose” beyond private concerns. Partially, then, such deaths are meant to make the survivors question the conditions (dash) — for unconsciously the species well knows there are reasons for such mass deaths that go beyond accepted beliefs.

[...] Yet, though each victim in an epidemic may die his or her own death, that death becomes part of a mass social protest. [...]

[...] Biological, sociological, or even economic factors may be involved, in that for a variety of reasons, and at different levels, whole groups of individuals want to die at any given time — but in such a way that their individual deaths amount to a mass statement.

[...] Those were deaths of protest.¹

[...] 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 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. [...]

(In this poem, which she wrote just a year ago, Jane deals not only with her transformation of her work into its inevitable literary, physical form, but restates her belief that her individualized consciousness will live after her physical death. Yet, just as it had been in the first poem in this series, her death was still on her mind some four and a half years later. [...]

[...] In another way they contain deep and private insights, ranging from her free, marveling childhood yearning and intuitive knowing up to her present physically impaired condition—her arthritic-like “symptoms,” as we call them—and beyond to the final state of her work after her death. [...]

I’ve always transferred my life to letters,
and one day it will reside
exclusively in written nouns and vowels,
clean paragraphs
distilled from mysterious life’s days.
Even before death’s event
I plan my mind’s resting place
as if there is a second life
in thought’s products that defies
the brain’s shorter span, and rises
sans blood, flesh, hand or eye,
self-contained, truly alive at last;
like some mental balloon
set on a safe course finally
through unexplored skies
when the hand that holds it
lets it go.

(Callista called Jane to tell her about several psychic experiences of her own, both before and after Buff’s death. One of these involved Callista knowing that her marriage to Buff would be short, and his death. [...]

[...] We haven’t seen Callista since Buff’s death.

[...] In telling me this Jane said Callista had foreseen events concerning James’s death. [...]

[...] There was a package of something he ordered that came after his death, connected with the initials N A R or the letters. [...]

[...] I can assure you that death is another beginning, that when you are dead, you are not silenced. [...] Is this presence that you sense here now within this room, death? [...]

[...] The physical matter of which you are seemingly composed will disintegrate (in physical death) but you will not disintegrate. [...]

[...] All action consists of change, for otherwise there would be a static universe, and indeed death would then be the end. [...]

[...] The grave is not the end, for so noisy a one never spoke with the lips of death. [...]

[...] Your rooms are full now of thought-forms that you do not perceive; and again, you are as much a ghostly phenomenon now as you will be after death. [...]

[...] The very words “life” and “death” serve to limit your understanding, to set up barriers where none intrinsically exist.

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. [...]

The main point I want to make in this chapter is that you are already familiar with all conditions you will meet after death, and you can become consciously aware of these to some extent. [...]

[...] The people believed that those ancestors still existed in the Christian heaven—or, earlier, in the Roman equivalent and they also believed that such a dimension awaited them to give them a further extension of existence after their own deaths. [...]

[...] The ordinary person, for example, in the western world cannot relate to a Darwinian past in that same fashion, and psychology robs him of any personal extension in the future after death, so in practical life most modern people have freedom of extension in space but less in time. [...]

[...] In a fashion (long pause) in this latest disaster, they took their land with them in their deaths. [...]

[...] People just before the earthquake even related imaginatively not only to their own ancestors, but to their children’s children after their own deaths, as those children lived their lives in the same locations, in the same land area. [...]

[...] (Pause.) So in a state of illumination private cellular memory may be animated, and beyond this, a deeper level of knowing in which your own birth and death may or may not be explained.

Now: Under such enforced conditions, you are literally facing egotistical consciousness with its own death in an encounter that need not occur — and while the physical body is fighting for its own life and vitality. [...]

[...] But the experiences undergone by the patients — and all of this applies to massive doses — represent the enactment, through terrible encounter, of the species’ birth into consciousness, and its death as consciousness falls back annihilated; followed by its rebirth as the individual patient struggles to emerge again from dimensions not native under those conditions.

[...] When periods of transcendence are felt under such conditions, they represent the psychic birth of a new personality from the sources of the old, and from the death, psychically, of the old. [...]

At one time or another most people consider the possibility of their own death. [...] With some people, however, the idea of death seems to grow obsessive, so that it is felt to be the one escape from life’s problems. [...]

[...] Some people who consider suicide believe in life after death, and some do not — and in the deepest of terms all deaths are somewhat suicidal. [...]

[...] She doesn’t know whether the death impression was symbolic or literal. We don’t know of anyone in our personal circle who has recently died, for instance, or who is close to death as far as we can tell.)

[...] At 9:33, Jane got an impression—twice, quickly—of a death and funeral flowers, she said. [...]

[...] With the death of Ruburt’s mother Rooney’s purpose was done as far as Ruburt was concerned; and Rooney did a final service, for through his death Ruburt faced the nature of pain and creaturehood that his mother’s life had so frightened him of.

[...] In your terms it was a probable death. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] 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.