“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In past he also died by water. Subconsciously you knew this. There was a girl in that past life. He also knew her in this life. There was an afternoon in this life between 4 and 5 years old, and this child visited with her parents. She also will die young or has already died but will not reach adulthood. At the time curly brown hair. She was his wife in the past life, when he died at 32. This involved a shipwreck. Now the manner of death is no coincidence, it is chosen. Some of the boy’s friends and acquaintances and neighbors died in this same manner. They were the crew in a ship that sank off coast of Spain. They were not frightened of water. They trusted water. If it led on occasion to death, it also led to adventure. Death by water in those days was an honor, death by land a disgrace. They considered water “Mother of all Earth.” He did. He would not want to die by land.

(Session addressed to Andrea Bergere, whose adopted son died by drowning last summer.)

In a previous life he was your son by blood. He died in that life in an accident. He came back to tell you there was no death—you would not listen, hear or believe. This time he came back and was a son to you. You knew him again under circumstances highly similar. This time you are listening. He came to tell you there was no death. You have been led here—you are to develop your abilities. This was his last reincarnation. He chose to stay here to tell you. You had too little faith in him. That you thought...

Without this knowledge you could not progress in the way you are now. He is teaching you. (Teach you love—he would not die.)

In past he also died by water. [...] She also will die young or has already died but will not reach adulthood. [...] She was his wife in the past life, when he died at 32. [...] Some of the boy’s friends and acquaintances and neighbors died in this same manner. [...] He would not want to die by land. [...]

(Usually we keep the records of her ESP class in a separate set of three-ring binders, but Jane wanted to insert this one as part of Session 393 in our “regular” sessions: She wanted to show Seth discussing a subject that was emotionally very important to a class member—Audrey Shepherd—whose adopted son had died by drowning last summer.)

[...] He died in that life in an accident. [...]

[...] [Teach you love—he would not die?]

[...] You cannot know for sure, of course, what would have happened otherwise … to those people who wanted to die. If they did not die of the disease, they may have ‘fallen prey’ to an accident, or died in a war, or in a natural disaster.

(Long pause at 10:31.) Give us a moment… Even in the days of the great plagues in England there were those smitten who did not die, and there were those untouched by the disease who dealt with the sick and dying. [...]

The sight of the dying gave them visions of the meaning of life, and stirred new [ideas] of sociological, political, and spiritual natures, so that in your terms the dead did not die in vain. [...]

[...] Yet, throughout your history no man or woman has died who did not want to die, regardless of the state of medical technology. [...]

[...] I must be more negative than I thought after all this time, for I didn’t believe her when she said she wasn’t going to die now. [...] When she says these days that she’s going to die, I agree with her.

Ruburt’s feeling is true: he is not ready to die yet — he will not die yet. [...]

(After a meager lunch she said that last night she got a flash, like an “ear pop,” that she wasn’t going to die at this time. [...]

[...] I’ve even thought of dying to let you go free.”

A man might die very shortly after his wife’s death, for example. Regardless of the circumstances, no one should judge such cases, for regardless of the way such a man might die, it would be because the thrust and intent and purpose of his life was no longer in physical reality.

[...] Innately, each person does realize that there is life after death, and in some instances such people realize that it is indeed time to move to another level of reality, to die and set out again with another brand-new world.

[...] The desire to die is considered cowardly, even evil, by some religions — and yet behind that desire lies all of the vitality of the will to life, which may already be seeking for new avenues of expression and meaning.

Much loneliness results when people who know they are going to die feel unable to communicate with loved ones for fear of hurting their feelings. [...]

[...] If she wanted to die that was it. [...] I decided — again — that I was through worrying about whether she’d live or die, or whether she was starving herself to death, or whatever.

(Her talk veered around to the fact that once again she said she was thinking of dying — in her sleep, maybe — in order to get some peace of mind, and to give me some. [...]

(She said all of this in that matter-of-fact voice she’d used the last time, that she’d told me similar things about her death, before Seth had said very recently that she wasn’t going to die now, no matter what she thought or said. [...]

[...] She asked me if I felt some hope, and I said yes — a strange question coming from someone who’d said earlier that they were strongly thinking of dying!

[...] People die when they are ready to die, for reasons that are their own. No person dies without a reason.² You are not taught that, however, so people do not recognize their own reasons for dying, and they are not taught to recognize their own reasons for living — because you are told that life itself is an accident in a cosmic game of chance.

In the Guyana affair, you had “red-blooded Americans” dying on a foreign shore (in South America), but not under a banner of war, which under certain circumstances would have been acceptable. You did not have Americans dying in a bloody revolution, caught among terrorists. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Many thousands may die in a particular battle or war, for example. [...]

The people who died were idealists — perfectionists of exaggerated quality, whose very desire for the good was tainted and distorted by those beliefs just mentioned. [...]

(“Did you die in battle?”)

(“Did you die there?”)

(“Where did you die?”)

(“In what city in Sweden did you die?”)

[...] She died at 17, there in the cobbler’s shop. She died from burns. [...] The cobbler shoved her out in the street and rolled her over on the stones and in the dirt, but she died.

[...] He was 53 years old when he died. The boy Albert was too young to take his place when he died, so the village didn’t have a cobbler for a couple of years. [...]

[...] Two died when they were babies. [...]

[...] The first Sarah who died at 17 never went. [...]

1. Seth’s material on dying and the nature of consciousness immediately reminded me of what he’d said at 11:20 in the 801st session: “Dying is a biological necessity…. Inherently, each individual knows that he or she must die physically in order to survive spiritually and psychically…. [...]

(11:44.) Others have finished with their challenges; they want to die and are looking for an excuse — a face-saving device. 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. [...]

Seth’s ideas about the true nature — the necessity — of dying directly contradict more and more of what we read these days. [...] Those in the know maintain that if you are fortunate enough to be a younger person, you may never have to die.

(10:20.) It is quite obvious that people must die — not only because otherwise you would overpopulate your world into extinction, but because the nature of consciousness requires new experience, challenge, and accomplishment. [...]

[...] It knows it dies and is reborn constantly, and yet retains itself. I use the terms “dies” and “is reborn” because you make sense of them, but the body does not. [...] It does not feel less or diminished when a cell dies, for it is also in the process of forming a new one.

(When she read the first page of this session after I’d typed it, Jane said, “It looks like I distorted that bit about atoms ‘dying.’ I don’t think it should be put that way, I guess. [...] And those particles that break off atoms and are released as radiation don’t ‘die’ as far as I know — although they might evolve….?”

For now, dictation: As most of you know, the atoms that compose your cells, as well as the cells themselves, constantly die and are replaced. [...]

[...] You, the larger self, have many bodies, each turning into the other as one dies and is reborn; yet You (capital Y) maintain your identity and your memory even as the smallest cell in your present body does.

[...] The earlier portions of the dream did, however, represent fears that Ruburt was, say, dying of suffocation—not physical suffocation, but from being bound too tightly.

[...] She took this to mean she was thinking of dying, and she didn’t want to do this, or leave the cats. [...]

(10:55.) Ruburt is too persistent to die young. [...]

[...] In certain terms you have discarded portions of yourself, so you died by degrees — but the two, the living and the dying, occur at once.

I think it very likely that aborted fetuses and those infants who die early in “life” — say within a few months after birth, especially — never intended to stay long within camouflage (physical) reality to begin with; the consciousnesses within those small human structures came just to momentarily sample our world of matter, whether from inside the womb or out of it. Considering their viewpoints, it’s not tragic that they “die” unborn, or at such young ages, although in ordinary terms the parents involved will almost certainly mourn deeply. [...]

[...] Particularly without offending your ideas of selfhood — yet each of you “alive” died in just such a manner.

(Intently at 9:36:) Now this does not mean that your personality as you know it was often trapped within a womb, destined to die there, or that a hypothetical whole self would not be born. [...]

[...] Some people die in adolescence, filled with the flush of life’s possibilities, still half-dazzled by the glory of childhood, and ready to step with elation upon the threshold of adulthood — or so it seems. Many such young persons prefer to die at that time, where they feel the possibilities for fulfillment are intricate and endless. [...]

[...] There are also mass statements of the same kind for people come together to die, however, to seek company in death as they do in life. People who feel powerless, and who find no cause for living, can come together then and “die for a cause” that did not give them the will or reason to live. [...]

People die for “a cause” only when they have found no cause to live by. [...]

[...] The grandfather had died of tuberculosis, hence Jane producing a distorted reference to a “breathing difficulty.” The grandfather had also died at the age of 67. [...]

(Jane has in her files a family record book going back to the mid 1800’s. Consulting this after the session we found that Seth was correct, that her grandfather had been 67 when he died March 12,1948. [...]

[...] Without naming names, he told me that the one of us dying first would succeed in communicating with the surviving partner in such a way that the results would give conclusive proof “to the masses.”

(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. [...]

[...] The others died in childbirth or in the first year. [...] The child who died at 18 would have been such a boy, and Throckmorton never really recovered from the lad’s death. He died incidentally of pneumonia: took sick and died within three days.

[...] I saw very clearly the front upstairs bedroom in which he slept, and the bed in which he died as a boy of 9. I made a very quick sketch of this mental picture with a ballpoint pen. [...]

She also contracted diphtheria and died at the age of 17. [...]

(“In what year did my brother Dick die, during that life?”)

The people who died at Jonestown believed that they must die. They wanted to die. [...]

Now: I said, in book dictation, I believe (in the 835th session), that the people of Jonestown died of an epidemic of beliefs — or words to that effect. [...]

(Long pause at 9:12.) Many people, wanting to die, do not seek out illnesses, of course. They may die in their sleep of unexplained heart failure or whatever, or in accidents. [...] Such a feeling, recognized, can also serve—as it did serve the woman’s mother—as a critical point of recognition that the desire to die was triggered not so much (long pause) by the feeling of life’s completion as by the fact that the individual had set up too many restrictions in life itself—restrictions that were severely cutting back its own possibilities of value fulfillment, or future effective action. [...]

[...] They give to life and receive from life more or less what they intended to, and are quite prepared to die and start anew. [...] Some people (pause) know very well that they have decided to die—or do not care (colon): they may “come down” with severe illnesses and then change their minds because for other reasons the very crises revive them.

(Long pause at 9:02.) When people finally want to die they will pursue that intent, because each physical death does indeed come—despite your beliefs—as the final framing or finishing touches or culmination of a given existence. [...]

[...] [Later note added by Jane: Did Barb die in 1968? [...]

(Although a friend of family died there—

(Barb dies in 1968 or 1960.)

[...] I believe it literally deals with Jane’s questioning over whether to live or die.

[...] “I don’t know whether I’m going to live or die.” [...]

(“I know you’ve been thinking it over, whether you want to live or die,” I said. [...]

[...] After watching her behavior as the month passed, I could see that she was indeed starving herself, and would die if she kept it up. [...]