“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I would like to make an aside here: In certain terms, you cannot destroy life by a nuclear disaster. You would of course destroy life as you know it, and in your terms bring to an end, if the conditions were right (or wrong), life forms with which you are familiar. In greater terms, however, mutant life would emerge — mutant only by your standards — but life quite natural to itself.

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(9:38.) To return to our main subject of the moment: The fact is that the so-called process of evolution is highly dependent upon the cooperative tendencies inherent in all properties of life and in all species. [...]

This inner and yet physical transmigration of consciousness has always been extremely important, and represents a natural method of communication, uniting all species and all physical life. [...]

[...] When Seth quoted me as referring to a “life cloud,” he went back to the discussion Jane and I had at lunch today, concerning recent news reports and articles: Some prominent astrophysicists, mathematicians, and astronomers have announced their belief in a theory of “panspermia”—that in ordinary terms of time life on earth was “seeded” from space, instead of arising by pure chance in some primordial ooze or sea on our planet. Those men believe in evolution—that once it originated, life, as Charles Darwin proposed, has ever since been growing in complexity and “evolving” through natural selection and random mutations, or DNA copying errors, into the life and beings we see and are today. [...] even at 4.6 billion years, the earth mathematically is not old enough for life to have had the time to evolve (beginning about 3.8 billion years ago) into its enormously complex current forms. [...]

Your own entire structure of life, therefore, with its acute and precise definitions in the package of reality, is a living life cloud that may or may not be perceived in other realities. [...] When you dream or sleep or think, you automatically add to other dimensions of a life cloud or dream cloud that emerge from the very actions of your own subjective motions.

The panspermian theory is that life reached the Earth from a living organization permeating our entire Milky Way galaxy, and that there is a creator, or intelligence, or God out there. In talking with Jane this noon I went the step further by saying that the galaxy itself is alive—not merely full of life. Jane and I discussed various ways that All That Is could have seeded life on earth through the roles of probabilities, and how certain successive forms could take root upon the earth when environmental and psychic conditions were right, and so give the appearance of an evolutionary progression. [...]

[...] Such life clouds “still” exist—and you had better put the word “still” in quotations. Each seed of life, of living, contains within itself its own protective coating, its own placenta of necessary nourishment and environmental circumstances, its own system and branches of probabilities.

At my age (63), then, I’m learning once again that I can’t live Jane’s life for her, or protect her from the motivations of her own physical and psychic explorations and choices, no matter how much I may want to. [...] And her innate mystical nature must fully know and accept that the time, manner, and method of her physical death, whenever it occurs, is as much a part of her body’s life as its life is. [...]

So, although I think that Jane has made some “remarkable gains” during recent weeks, I also think that basically she has yet to resolve the entire issue of her illnesses—or even whether to continue physical life. [...] Life decisions are often made in just such a fashion. [...]

[...] This applies in each area of life. In your terms, it applies both before life and after it. [...]

[...] She has an incredible stubborn patience with physical life. [...]

(With pauses:) Ruburt is truly beginning to understand that the Magical Approach is indeed the natural approach to life’s experience. [...]

(Long pauses.) You do not have to worry in an overly strained way about putting the new principles of life into practical experience at once. [...]

[...] Theoretically at least, the magical approach should be used because it represents the most harmonious method of life (underlined). [...]

(9:24.) You should understand that the approach is the best one to use in life, generally speaking, but it will improve all conditions, even if you still have difficulties in certain areas (pause), and that its use cannot help but promote the overall quality of your lives. [...]

[...] For all its many errors, at its best Christianity proclaimed the ultimate meaning for each person’s life. There was no question but that life had meaning, whether or not you might agree as to the particular meaning assigned to it.

[...] Now, you have far more decisions to make, and in a world of conflicting beliefs, brought into your living room through newspapers and television, you must try to find the meaning of your life, or the meaning of life.

The psyche expresses itself through action, of course, but it carries behind it the thrust from which life springs, and it seeks the fulfillment of the individual — and it automatically attempts to produce a social climate or civilization that is productive and creative. [...] It seeks to flesh out its dreams, and when these find no response in social life, it will nevertheless take personal expression in a kind of private religion of its own.

[...] Seth ‘never promised us a rose garden,’ and we have our good days and our bad days as we encounter life’s daily challenges, joys, adventures, and misadventures. [...]

[...] They realized that their life was a portion of all this life. [...] But at their level, and in their level of experience, they partook of the sacrament of life as they ate those things that they slayed. [...]

[...] Each individual life, all life, has its own built-in mechanisms against danger. [...]

[...] You can do the same thing without realizing it by projecting into the idea of violence, all powers, and then it seems to you that life itself has no ability to protect itself and that any stray thought of violence or disaster will immediately zoom home and that the recipient has no way to protect himself. [...]

[...] It realizes that the strength and vitality of life is as much in lightening and thunder and the storm as in the sunshine. [...]

[...] It dealt with the idea that imperfections in the universe gave birth to life and all we know—that if the “big bang” had expanded perfectly uniformly there would be no life in the universe, merely a perfectly uniform cloud of lifeless hydrogen gas. It took me a while to realize that the author had said nothing at all about the idea of life as we know it being latently present all the while in the primordial cloud before it began to expand. Then I thought that in the perfectly expanding, uniform hydrogen cloud, nothing would be needed, in those terms [the author’s]—not even life itself. [...] Probably that there is no such thing in nature as perfection, and that although we think we can conceive of such a quality, we really cannot—hence the way is left open for such messy manifestations as “life,” etc.)

[...] (Long pause.) The nature of creativity, regardless of any given specific manifestation, is shown in an overall generalized fashion that automatically increases the quality of life, and such benefits are definite regardless of what other conditions also become apparent. [...]

[...] You should begin such a program as soon as possible, regarding it, however, as not a last desperate approach toward an unsolvable problem, but as a proper step of development in your understanding of the magical approach to life. [...]

[...] You can certainly add to life’s enjoyment and bring about some improvement at the very least in Ruburt’s condition. [...]

In terms of earthly life as you understand it, it is overly optimistic to imagine that eventually all illnesses will be conquered, all relationships be inevitably fulfilling, or to foresee a future in which all people on earth are treated with equality and respect. For one thing, in that larger framework mentioned earlier in this book, illness itself is a part of life’s overall activity. Disease states, so-called, are as necessary to physical life as normal health is, so we are not speaking of a nirvana on earth — but we are saying that it is possible for each reader of this book to quicken his or her private perceptions, and to extend and expand the quality of ordinary consciousness enough so that by contrast to current experience, life could almost be thought of as “heaven on earth.”

These ideas are translations of the emotional attitudes of all portions of nature and of life itself. They are better than any medicine, and they promote the expression of value fulfillment of all kinds of life, whatever its form.

In this life Ruburt feared a laxness within himself because of his mother’s remarks about his father. [...]

(“When was that life?”)

This is in your life as Nebene. [...]

[...] So you had a secret life, unknown to your students for some time. [...]

[...] This applies in each area of life. In your terms, it applies both before life and after it. [...]

[...] It pervades the events in your life, the overall inner direction, the quality of perception. It fills up and illuminates the individual aspects of your life, and largely determines the pervasive subjective climate in which you dwell.

Within this framework you have full freedom to create your experience, your personal life in all of its aspects, the living picture of the world. Your personal life, and to some extent your individual living experience, help create the world as it is known in your time.

[...] The personal life that you know rises up from within you, yet it is given. [...] Since you are a part of Being, then in a certain fashion you give yourself the life that is being lived through you.

[...] Consider art as a natural phenomena constructed by the psyche, a trans-species of perception and consciousness that changes, enlarges and expands life’s experiences and casts them in a different light, offering new opportunities for creating action and new solutions to problems by inserting new, original data. [...]

To confine such creativity to solve life’s problems primarily or to direct it primarily in that fashion, limits it and holds it in an improper focus; shackles it. [...]

We have to go beyond that—the point of problem-solving or problem-focus —back to stressing the creative larger-than-life aspects, otherwise all we have is a better problem-solving framework. [...]

The larger view is that art by being itself, is bigger than life, while springing from it; that Seth and my books go beyond that simply by being themselves. [...]

[...] Life implies death, and death implies life — that is, in the terms of your world. In those terms life is a spoken element, while death is the unspoken but still-present element “beneath,” upon which life rides. [...]

Your very physical life, then, implies a “source,” a life out of which the physical one emerges, dash — the implied, unspoken, unmaterialized, unsounded vitality that supplied the ingredients for the physical, bodily, molecular “alphabet.” Your physical life therefore implies a nonphysical one. [...]

To obtain knowledge consciously other than that usually available, you pay attention to the pauses, to the implied elements in language, to any felt or sensed quality upon which the recognizable experiences of life reside. [...]

The mechanics of transition therefore are highly variable, as the mechanics of physical life are highly variable. [...] This kind of sexual identification, however, also impedes personality development during physical life.

[...] There are cases in which a personality goes very quickly into another physical life, in perhaps a matter of hours. This is usually unfortunate, and is caused by an obsessive desire to return to physical life.

The time of choosing is dependent upon the condition and circumstances of the individual following transition from physical life. [...]

[...] Any problems that were not faced in this life will, however, be faced in another one. [...]

The death, say, of physical tissue, is merely a part of the process of life as you know it in your system, a part of the process of becoming. And from those tissues, as you know, new life will spring.

[...] Will the emotions that propelled me in life continue to do so? [...]

I will answer the questions in those terms also, then; but before I do so, there are several seemingly impractical considerations concerning the nature of life and death, with which we must deal.

[...] Life is a state of becoming, and death is a part of this process of becoming. [...]

[...] All of this goes back to ideas that existence must be justified, and Ruburt’s early ideas that writing would justify his life—but writing should express life, and is an expression of being, an expression of spontaneity, an expression of emotion, of body as well as mind (all intently). [...]

[...] Enjoy the intimate behavior of life, the compensations that are available, and your own relationship, which provides more creative solutions than you realize. [...] You are in the stream of life because you are alive. [...]

[...] This event made me physically aware of that area in a fresh way—especially the isolation, and what I take to be my symbolic interpretation of a simpler way of life. [...]

[...] They are part of life’s art. [...]

[...] In all forms of life each individual is born into a world already provided for it, with circumstances favorable to its growth and development; a world in which its own existence rests upon the equally valid existence of all other individuals and species, so that each contributes to nature’s whole.

[...] Of course [a species] must survive to do so, but it will, however, purposefully avoid survival if the conditions are not practically favorable to maintain the quality of life or existence that is considered basic.

A species that senses a lack of this quality can in one way or another destroy its offspring — not because they could not survive otherwise, but because the quality of that survival would bring about vast suffering, for example, so distorting the nature of life as to almost make a mockery of it. [...]

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

But nowhere do we see anything about any spiritual dilemmas that may be involved with all of this, or about the enormous social problems — challenges, to be sure — that could soon begin to manifest themselves if anything even approaching “eternal life” comes within the reach of numbers of people. [...] If the services necessary to extend life are free — paid for by the government, that is — will government decide that certain families simply cannot be allowed to have children, that they’ll be left to die out? [...] And what about animals and other forms of life? [...]

(Long pause.) Natural disasters represent an understandably prejudiced concept, in which the vast creative and rejuvenating elements important to planetary life, and therefore to mankind, are ignored. [...]

[...] The atoms and molecules within those chairs and couches are quite alert, though you do not grant them the quality of life. [...]

[...] In personal terms, again, each species is concerned not only with survival but with the quality of its life and experience.

[...] I didn’t know whether to attempt to forgive him or demand life imprisonment, for example. In short, I thought it grossly unfair that the cause of the accident was still alive—although hospitalized —while two “innocent” victims were dead, with a whole family damaged beyond repair, for life. [...]

[...] He did not want to live into an old age—but more than that, life had lost its flavor for him. He had sired his children, loved as well as he could, done his job—but there was no contemplative life to look forward to, no greater love than the one with his wife—and that love while conventionally sound enough, did not content him.

[...] Physical life is a fantastic event, in which all kinds of preferences, feelings, beliefs, desires, and experiences are possible—within of course the physical level.

I mentioned before that some people court exciting and dangerous sports, living quite purposefully on the edge of death, and choosing to taste life spiced exotically by the ever-present sprinkling of ashes. [...]

In this life Ruburt knew his neighborhood as a child, and his feelings about people were not tempered by television programs showing normal families, or other ways of life. He believed that life was a life-and-death struggle, and having finally found what he wanted to do, his mode of survival, he brought out all of his artillery to protect himself while he did his thing.

You can have an overall plan for life as long as it is not too rigid, but you live your life a day at a time. [...]

[...] The body coming to life is active, and its activity may clamor at times. [...]

In all of this he did not until recently realize, or want to realize, that he was not fully responding to his own life, or even that he was not fully functional, but “responsive” was the word. [...]

Our work has given you additional purpose in life. Our work should also show you how to enjoy your life. [...]

[...] Your present life is like a book that you are writing. [...]

[...] The nature of your particular achievements has something to do with the period in your life in which they are accomplished.

[...] Despite the errors that have been made, you did set about to gain the necessary knowledge, and all the episodes in your life have been used in this behalf. [...]