“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You are not accepting life on life’s terms as an individual. You are demanding that it behave in certain ways, and take courses that you have consciously set upon, and you are refusing to gladly accept life as life, as its own reason and cause within you.

Once you wholeheartedly accept life on life’s terms, then you may indeed find what you are after, but not while you insist upon it as a condition for continued existence in this life. You have no right to set such terms, any more than a flower would insist upon sunny ground and a preferred spot within the garden as a prerequisite for its own existence.

Now. Practically speaking, you must stop insisting upon male-female personal love as the condition of existence. You must accept life on its own terms with the faith that your life now has a meaning and a beauty and a purpose. You can do this, and I know that you can do it. Then you will begin to see the meaning in your life that has always been there, and the purpose and joy that you have not been able to fill.

This idea that you must (underlined) find a man that will love you and you alone, is a cover to hide this deeper refusal to accept life on life’s terms. There is a cultural aspect here that you do not realize, and that you would consider beneath you.

[...] 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. But the mother did not give the life. The life came from All That Is, from the spirit of life itself, and was freely given — to be taken away by no one, or threatened by no one or no force, until that life fulfills its own purposes and decides to travel on.

[...] Life as you know it could not exist if everything was conscious in those terms. [...] In important ways your dreams make your life possible by ordering your psychological life automatically, as your physical body is ordered automatically for you. [...]

[...] In this case it was the realization emotionally that life is not given by the parent, but through the parent — by LIFE (in capitals) itself, or All That Is, and “with no strings attached.”

This does not mean that those people are committing suicide in the same way that a person does who takes his life — but that in a unique psychological manipulation they no longer hold the same claim to life as they had before. [...]

(Long pause.) Each being experiences life as if it were at life’s center. [...] Each manifestation of consciousness comes into being feeling secure at life’s center — experiencing life through itself,¹ aware of life through its own nature. [...]

[...] A person who feels that life has no meaning, and that his or her life in particular has no meaning, would rather be pursued than ignored. [...] If the paranoid might feel that he [or she] is pursued, by the government or “ungodly powers,” then at least he feels that his life must be important: otherwise, why would others seek to destroy it? If voices tell him he is to be destroyed, then these at least are comforting voices, for they convince him that his life must have value.

(Pause.) Men can become deranged if they believe life has no meaning. [...] Science, including psychology, by what it has said, and by what it has neglected to say, has come close to a declaration that life itself is meaningless. [...] It denies man the practical use of those very elements that he needs as a biological creature: the feeling that he is at life’s center, that he can act safely in his environment, that he can trust himself, and that his being and his actions have meaning.

[...] Quite simply, these values have to do with increasing the quality of whatever life the being feels at its center. The quality of that life is not simply to be handed down or experienced, for example, but is to be creatively added to, multiplied, in a way that has nothing to do with quantity.

The information on the Denmark life in Chapter Eleven is correct, except for a misinterpretation. That was one life divided into two separate periods — literally a life divided in terms of interests, concentration of abilities, and life styles.

The reality, the validity, the immediacy of those lives do exist simultaneously with your present life. The distance between one life and another exists psychologically, and not in terms of years or centuries. [...] There are certain lives, as there are certain events in this life, that you may not want to face or deal with. There may be great temperamental differences in some cases, between your personality in one given life and another — so that your present self simply could not relate to the other’s experience.

Now if the life in question is a recent one, in your terms, the details may be more readily recalled and far more precise. Even a life centuries ago may be perfect in detail however if it included, for example, battles or events of great import, where the dates themselves were impressed upon the personalities because of the occurrences at those times.

Aside from the information given in that chapter, there have been distortions in some past material concerning that life. [...]

[...] For example, an excellent, satisfying life with a minimum of problems may be chosen either as a prelude to a life of concentrated challenge or as a self-adopted reward for a previous difficult life. [...]

[...] If in one life, for example, you hated women, you may very well be a woman in the next life. [...]

A chronically ill existence, for example, might also be a measure of discipline, enabling you to use deeper abilities that you ignored in a life of good health. The perfectly happy life for example, on the surface, may appear splendid, but it may also be basically shallow and do little to develop the personality.

[...] You cannot justify or rationalize present circumstances by saying, “This is because of something I did in a past life,” for within yourself now is the ability to change negative influences. You may have brought negative influences into your life for a given reason, but the reason always has to do with understanding, and understanding removes those influences.

[...] 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 was his wife in the past life, when he died at 32. [...]

In a previous life he was your son by blood. He died in that life in an accident. [...]

There was in past life connection with your brother. [...] The brother in this life was the blood father as you were blood mother. [...]

[...] Work in this life is completed, reincarnation cycle completed. [...]

[...] You are not under a sentence placed upon you for original sin, by any childhood events, or by past-life experience. Your life, for example, may be far less fulfilling than you think you would prefer. You may be less when you would be more, but you are not under a pall placed upon your psyche, either by original sin, Freud’s infancy syndromes, or past-life influences. I will try to explain the past-life influences a bit more clearly here. [...] One life is not buried in the past, disconnected from the present self and any future self as well.

I have also discussed reincarnation in terms of environment because many schools of thought over-emphasize the effects of reincarnational existences, so that often they explain present-life circumstances as a result of rigid and uncompromising patterns determined in a “past” life. [...]

Now: I have spent some time emphasizing the fact that each of us forms our own environment, because I want you to realize that the responsibility for your life and your environment is your own.

[...] In each life you choose and create your own settings or environments; and in this one you chose your parents and whatever childhood incidents that came within your experience. [...]

Again, no one is punished for crimes committed in a past life, and in each life you are unique. The inner intelligence within you that gives you each life also gives you the conditions of each life. [...]

In a basic way, it is possible for present beliefs to actually modify the beliefs of a life that is seemingly a past one. [...] Your conventional ideas of time make it simpler, however, to speak of one life as happening before or after another.

These are all part of the continuous undercurrents of life, and the same issues apply to many other species whose offspring are lost in very early life.

The child may go from one illness to another, or simply display an odd disinclination for life — a lack of enthusiasm, until finally in some cases the child dies at an early age. Another individual, under the same circumstances, might change its mind and decide to go along with the experience of normal life.

[...] 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 was his wife in the past life, when he died at 32. [...]

[Seth:] In a previous life he was your son by blood. He died in that life in an accident. [...]

There was in past life connection with your brother. [...] The brother in this life was the blood father as you were blood mother. [...]

[...] Work in this life is completed, reincarnation cycle completed.

Children accept life wholeheartedly. [...] The woman who had cancer and was cured gave up the restrictions she had placed about her life. [...] There is no such thing as a wasted life, no matter how it might appear, and while the desire for death is a natural one, it can also serve at various stages as one that extends any given life for a while by clearing away old debris. The desire actually works for the purpose of value fulfillment, whether it can be pursued more fully in this life, or whether it is time to begin a new one. [...]

[...] 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. [...] The person recognizes the restrictions and changes his or her ways accordingly, opening the doorway not into death but to further life and action in this space and time. [...]

[...] The belief in the struggle for survival so super-pervades that anything but the most competitive, determined, super-valiant, compulsive desire to hold onto life appears to be cowardly, a cop-out, at best an unexplainable, erratic, unnatural response to life’s conditions. [...]

(8:43.) In that framework it almost seems as if the most natural wish would be the wish to live one life for some kind of eternal duration. [...] (Long pause.) The impulse toward life is indeed strong, brilliant and enduring. [...]

[...] Self-understanding and self-knowledge may be able to change the individuals’ lives for the better, regardless of their activities or conditions of life. It is true that these individuals do choose for themselves a carefully planned and regulated style of life, in which the threat of death is encountered personally and regularly; each day becomes an odyssey, in which death and life are purposefully weighed. [...]

Life, then, has the sweetest buoyancy, the greatest satisfaction, because it is contrasted with the ever-present threat of death. Many such people do not feel at all safe living under life’s usual conditions. [...]

[...] It regards all activity as experience, as a momentary condition of life (pause), as a balancing situation. But it possesses a sense of wholeness and of overall integrity, for it knows that it continues to exist, though under different conditions, and it realizes that this change is as natural and necessary as the change of seasons if each individual is to continue to exist, while the earth itself possesses the nutriments necessary to the survival of physical life.

[...] Trapeze performers, stunt men and women, race-car riders, and many other groups have a life-style that includes death-defying stunts on a very regular basis.

Now I tell you: That intensification, appreciated and understood, and the experience of life and living, accepted unconditionally, can bring you in this lifetime another birth in which the doctor’s pronouncements are meaningless. Spiritually the death sentence given you is another chance at life, if you are freely able to accept life with all of its conditions and to feel its full dimensions, for that alone will rejuvenate your spiritual and physical self.

In the entire fabric of your existence, this life is a brilliant, eternally unique and precious portion, but only a portion, from which you emerge with joy and understanding whether you die tomorrow or in years to come. The choice of life and death is always yours.

Life and death are but two faces of your eternal, ever-changing existence, however. [...] You have lived before, and will again, and your new life, in your terms, springs out of the old, and is growing in the old and contained within it as the seed is already contained within the flower.

No man or woman consciously knows for sure which day will be the last for him or her in this particular life, that each calls the present one. [...]

Each life influences each other life, and some portion of the personality retains memory not only of past lives, but of future lives also.

[...] It does mean, however, that you are innately aware of all of your existences, and that the knowledge gained in one life is automatically transferred to another, whether that life be present, past, or future.

I want to stress that within each life full free will operates once the conditions of that life are set.

When reincarnational studies are embarked upon, on occasion people remember some instance of past-life experience, but conventional ideas of time are so strong that so-called future memory is blacked out.

[...] Come into contact with the life that is within you now, not with words. I am not asking you to relate to the word life, but to life itself and to do this you must experience the life within yourself and feel it. [...]

([Mark Disbrow:] “That first question, ‘How relevant is life?’ You mean physical life?”)

[...] “How revelant is life? How revelant is your life?” and I will add a third portion. [...]

[...] What does life mean to you? Then listen and feel the life within you. [...]

In those terms, past or future-life memories usually remain like ghost images by contrast. [...] Other life memories are carried along, so to speak, beneath those other pulses — never, in certain terms, coming to rest so that they can be examined, but forming, say, the undercurrents upon which the memories of your current life ride.

(10:01.) The memory, left alone, not structured, will shimmer, shake, take other forms, and transform itself before your [mental] eyes, so that its shape will seem like a psychological kaleidoscope through whose focus the other events of your life will also shimmer and change. Such a memory exercise can also serve to bring in other-life memories. Edges, corners, and reflections will appear, however, perhaps superimposed upon memories that you recognize as belonging to this life.

In a quiet moment, off guard, you might remember an event from this life, but there may be a strange feeling to it, as if something about it, some sensation, does not fit into the time slot in which the event belongs. In such cases that [present-life] memory is often tinged by another, so that a future or past life memory sheds its cast upon the recalled event. [...]

You must remember the creativity and the open-ended nature of events, for even in one life a given memory is seldom a “true version” of a past event. [...]

[...] Beneath this is the feeling that his life is of no value, that he is in fact worthless, weaker than his peers, and he detests himself enough so that he might take his own life. [...] He was taught not to express himself, so he only uses those abilities to protect his life, which justifies them. [...]

Any purpose is better than none, and any intended personalized threat is better than an existence in which no life is important enough to be individually threatened, so these imagined threats serve to convince our young man that his life must have meaning or purpose—otherwise others would not be so intent on destroying him. [...]

[...] In your living you literally bring your ideas to life. You form the story of your life. [...]

[...] Its very danger keeps him on his toes, and forces him to protect his life. [...] It is therefore a mental device meant to protect his life. [...]

(4:42.) I am not saying that the events in one life cause the events in another, but that there is an overall pattern — a bank of probable events — and that in each life each individual chooses those that suit his or her overall private purposes. [...] An individual may have a serious illness in one life. [...] In still another life, the individual might have a dear friend who suffers from the same disease. [...]

No one is fated, however, to suffer in one life for any crimes committed in another. The reasons and purposes for one’s own existence in any life can be found directly in the life itself.

[...] 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. Physical life must end if it is to survive. There are certain conditions, however, that promote suicidal activity, and the termination of one’s own life has been held in great disrepute by many religions and societies, though not in all.

[...] That is a quite natural reaction to the conditions of life. 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. [...]

Again, the desire for value fulfillment, development and purpose is so strong that if those seem denied, life becomes — or seems to become — less precious. In many cases it is the son and daughter of the upper middle-classes, or the well-to-do, who run into such life-endangering dilemmas. [...]

[...] The entire idea involves a process in which you try and not try at the same time, in which you do not strain to achieve results, but instead gently begin to allow yourself to follow the contours of your own subjective feelings, to uncover those spiritual and biologically valid beliefs of early childhood, and to bring to them the very best wisdom that you have acquired throughout your life so far.

[...] The intimate “trivial” events of life are life—they are living, in your terms. This means that housekeeping and life’s daily chores are a mark of the living vitality of the moment—a mark of physical life as you know it. [...]

[...] He has shown himself (Jane held her right arm out; in the last couple of days it has straightened out noticeably) that the body can change—that alternate realities can alter the present that you know, and that new intent can alter a life.

[...] Ruburt must be himself, fulfilling himself, and those joyful, free, personal and intimate freedoms of his life. [...]

I also want to stress here that all aspects of life experience not only sensations but emotional feelings. Therefore, there is a kind of innate gallantry that operates among all segments of life — a gallantry that deserves your respect and consideration. You should have respect, then, for the cells of your body, the thoughts of your mind (pause), and try to understand that even the smallest of creatures shares with you the emotional experience of life’s triumphs and vulnerabilities.

(After she’d eaten and I was getting ready to leave, Jane said, “I really feel guilty at making your life so hard,” and added more words to that effect. [...] I replied that we’d better forget that and try to focus on the future — yet such guilt feelings could be playing a significant role in her daily life, and we should find out if this is so.

[...] Remember that each segment of life is motivated by value fulfillment, and is therefore always attempting to use and develop all of its abilities and potentials, and to express itself in as many probable ways as possible, in a process that is cooperatively — correction: in a process that takes into consideration the needs and desires of each other segment of life.

In the same fashion, diseases also, in the overall picture, promote the health and well-being of life in all of its aspects. Value fulfillment operates within microbes and nations, within individual creatures and entire species, and it unites all of life’s manifestations so that indeed creatures and their environments are united in an overall cooperative venture — a venture in which each segment almost seeks to go beyond itself in creativity, growth, and expression. [...]