[...] The body consciousness alone understands that its physical existence in any one life is dependent upon its physical death — and that that death will assure it of still another existence. The “drive for survival” is, therefore, a drive that leads to death and beyond it, for all of consciousness understands that it survives through many forms and conditions.

[...] They do not anticipate death before it happens, however. [...]

[...] They regulate their own births — and their own deaths. [...]

[...] Life is seen as “a valley of tears” — almost as a low-grade infection from which the soul can be cured only by death.

We will be dealing now, after what I hope is suitable background material, with some chapters on the nature of existence after physical death, at the point of death, and involving the final physical death at the end of the reincarnational cycle. [...]

[...] The peaks and valleys of consciousness that I mentioned exist to some degree in all consciousness despite the form adopted (adepted) after death (deth). [...]

[...] And after death you are simply aware of the greater powers of consciousness that exist within you all the time.

[...] This will directly (dreactly) assist you in after-death (agter) experience. [...]

A connection with a death. [...] The death involved the feeling of strangulation. [...]

[...] This could signify a death connection but I do not know.” We think this also refers to the death of the priest whom Jane knew in her childhood. [...]

[...] You will say, “The four egos belonging to Eve all belonged to one physical body, but in the reincarnational process we are faced with the issue of several bodies, each one discarded and experiencing physical death.”

[...] This could signify a death connection but I do not know.

“The other day Jane and I were talking about people who maintain that the universe is an accident, or that it has no meaning, or that there’s no such thing as life after death, or that psychic abilities don’t exist—that sort of thing. [...] Some people have built careers around negative beliefs like that, and Jane and I were wondering how they react after physical death, when they discover that they still live—that they may have spent their professional lives maintaining belief systems which after death they begin to understand are quite wrong. [...] And how do such people react after death when they start to get glimmerings about the workings of reincarnation,³ for example?”

There are those who overrelied upon religious beliefs, using them as crutches, and in [later lives] then, they might—such people—throw those crutches away overreacting to their newfound “freedom”; and through living lives as meaningless they then realize, after death, that the meaningfulness of existence was after all not dependent upon any religious system. [...]

[...] Specifically, however, such life episodes will of course involve their “moments” of after-death realization—dismay, shock, or what have you.

(“Can you give us the year of your death, Frank Watts?”)

(“Did you live in the United States at the time of your death?”)

(“Saros was just three, then, at the time of death?”)

(“What was your age at the time of your death?”)

Again, your own consciousness triumphantly rides above those deaths that you do not recognize as such. In your chosen three-dimensional existence, however, and in those terms, your consciousness finally recognizes a death. [...] There is a time when you, as a consciousness, decide that death will happen, when in your terms you no longer bridge the gap of minute deaths not accepted.

[...] In basic terms the body dies often, and as surely as you think it dies but once in the death you recognize. On numerous occasions it physically breaks apart, but your consciousness rides beyond those “deaths.” [...]

(Pause at 10:43, during a strong delivery.) Here consciousness decides to leave the flesh, to accept an official¹⁴ death. [...] Other species of consciousness — of a different order entirely, and with a different rhythm of experience — would think of a life in your terms as a day, and have no trouble bridging that gap between apparent life, death, and new life.

[...] In these ideal terms, death would involve a closing down of your [physical] house; it would not be crumbling about you.

[...] Often such people are in a very depressed state of mind, so that they have already closed their thoughts to the reasons for living, and only keep reminding themselves of the availability of death.

[...] Death is not a solution. [...]

(3:54.) It is futile to tell such a person that he or she can not, or must not, commit suicide — and indeed, such a procedure can be quite dangerous, hardening the person’s leaning toward a death decision. [...]

[...] When you imagine a life after death as unnatural or supernatural then you feel divorced, cut off and bewildered. [...] Your existence before and after death is as much a normal phenomenon as your present life.

It is natural to live after death, and natural to return the body to earth and [then to] form another. [...]

[...] It is true to say that each individual dies alone, for no one else can die that death. It is also true that part of the species dies with each death, and is reborn with each birth, and that each private death takes place within the greater context of the existence of the entire species. The death serves a purpose species-wise while it also serves the purposes of the individual, for no death comes unbidden.

[...] Much of this is on a predictive basis: The scientists “predict” how many people might be “attacked” by, say, a virus that has caused a given number of deaths. [...]

[...] The body is exerted to use its immune system to the utmost, and sometimes, according to the inoculation, overextended [under such] conditions.⁴ Those individuals who have psychologically decided upon death will die in any case, of that disease or another, or of the side effects of the inoculation.

[...] Particularly since [the advent of Charles] Darwin’s theories,⁵ the acceptance of the fact of death has come to imply a certain kind of weakness, for is it not said that only the strong survive?

Morning makes sense
To any animal,
And each one feels
Death’s decimal.

We’ve never learned to add
For all our numbers’ worth.
Division and subtraction
Will total up to death.

[...] The death of a kitten that year led me to write:

Death came in and took my cat
And passed right by my dog.
He chased her through the living room
Over the woolen rug.
I sat right there and never knew.
I sat right there and never saw.

AFTER-DEATH CHOICES AND THE
MECHANICS OF TRANSITION

There are unlimited varieties of experience open to you after death, all possible, but some less probable than others, according to your development. [...]

[...] Would she survive death when it came, in meaningful terms? And behind all these questions there was the big one: Was Seth really a personality who had survived death? [...]

[...] As I stood there, suddenly I “heard” Seth tell me, mentally, that my dream had forseen her condition which would lead to her death.

[...] When Seth paused for a moment, he asked, “You said once that the shock of birth was worse than the shock of death. [...]

[...] Death in your terms is a termination but does not involve such immediately critical manipulations. [...]

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 reincarnation. [...]

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

[...] I’m especially intrigued by any similarities between my two adventures and the near-death experiences we’ve been reading about lately. [...] I hadn’t been near death during my own experiences, certainly, but I do feel that through them I’d glimpsed ever so slightly that “light of the universe” that’s been so eagerly sought for—and sometimes reported—throughout history.

[...] The connection was beneath, however, and also represented your feeling that even those people tortured to death did live again. [...] The lights connected life and death, then. [...]

Now: On certain occasions, sometimes near the point of death, but often simply in conscious states outside of the body, man is able to perceive that kind of light. [...]

3. See the passages following Jane’s entry for March 31, 1977, in Chapter 10 of her The After Death Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James.

(After a serious discussion of the search for truth, life after death, religious backgrounds, etc. [...]

[...] Those who survive physical death are individuals as they have always been. [...]

[...] Death and life are indeed one and the same. [...]

(My questions to Seth about life and death sprang out of my hassles this morning about insurance, oddly enough. [...]

[...] We shut out the early deaths from our conscious awareness as we move through probabilities. [...]

Ruburt did feel that it was not safe to let go, lest relaxation mean death. [...] Death in your terms certainly seems an end, but it is instead a translation of life into another form.

[...] Others with the same knowledge found that death was the accepted probability. [...]

Nor is such an inner decision forced upon the conscious personality, for in all such instances, the conscious personality has at various times come close to accepting the idea of death at the particular time in life.

[...] It was the fear of death — not chosen, of course — the fear that if he did not deliver, work hard, and pay his mother back for a life magically given, grudgingly given, then in a magical equation she, the mother, could take it back. [...]

The Way Toward Health is more than an account of the stay — and death — of my wife, Jane Roberts, in a hospital in Elmira, New York, just 13 years ago. [...]

Our lives, I’ve learned, don’t simply proceed nicely and directly from “birth” to “death.” [...]

[...] Since her death many have written to both sympathize and to ask “Why?” She had Seth, didn’t she — for whom she spoke for some 21 years; she also produced six books with him along the way (plus a number of books on her “own”). [...]

(“What was the cause of my death?”)

(“What was the cause of Seth’s death?”)

(“How long does it take for a person to realize his death, usually?”)