“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] You will learn to be responsible for life. You will learn to protect and cherish life as you know it and the plant life as you know it. [...]

[...] You do indeed choose your own environment and your own life circumstances. And before this life you have already set those challenges that you will meet. [...]

[...] You are to cooperate with all life and all life is a part of All That Is and every animal has consciousness and you will realize this or you will destroy your planet. [...]

[...] I remember the forms through which I have spoken and you do not, but look at it this way: The child that you were in this life has a far different form than the person you are now, and yet you spoke through that form. [...]

There is a very practical reason for a reverence for all life, and very practical reasons why man must learn certain facts that up to this point he has considered impractical. He has usually managed to separate his ethical conceptions from his daily business life, but this shall be increasingly difficult for him to manage.

A reverence for life is a saving characteristic of any personality who has it. [...] Reverence for life will also enable you to understand and deal with other human beings in a more kindly and beneficial manner.

[...] I do not want this session to run too long, however the reverence for life is so important that I wanted to underline it, and also to emphasize that it includes all life and man himself.

His discipline is improving and has improved this life, especially since the ending of the adolescent period. [...]

You are utterly dependent upon the life force—without which you could not lift your finger. We are all utterly dependent upon the life force, without which there would be no individuals, and this you must accept. [...] It is dependent upon the life force. [...] And if the life force did not fill the plant, no amount of watering would make it grow. [...]

And if the life force did not sustain you, then you could cry, “I am I!” to nothing, for there would be no self to cry. Each of us is dependent upon the spirit of life—without which there is no life—without which there is no vitality—and no song and no mind to question. [...]

[...] As you create and experience your daily life through your personal feelings and beliefs, so the same applies to dream reality.

[...] There must be some differentiation between dream and waking experience just so that you can manipulate in the more narrowly focused daily life.

Such a procedure can bring you in contact with wisdom you have been denying yourself, help unify your entire life situation, and release your energy for practical everyday purposes. [...]

As your present situation with all of its challenges, joys and problems is contained in condensed form within each of your days, so the same applies to your life. [...]

[...] But that must happen all of the time!) The uncertainty perceived here by the conscious self, however, can act as a great restraint toward knowing a future life or lives—just as much as might the fear of tuning into one’s physical death ahead of time in this life. Hook up those two factors with the quite natural concern that at least some events in any life to come will inevitably be unpleasant, or worse, and we have at least three powerful restraints, or psychic blocks, inhibiting awareness of future lives. [...]

I think it quite humorous (and ironic) that whether or not they realize it, those who engage in past-life regressions play with the notion of future selves all of the time—for from the standpoint of any “past” lives they reach their present lives obviously represent future existences. In a way, and in those terms, this also applies in Jane’s case when she contacts Seth, even on the “psychological bridge” those two have constructed between them: When Seth tells us that his last physical life was in Denmark in the 1600s, then Jane and I represent future physical selves of his. [...] (This time, see Appendix 18 for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality.) Yet we are all of us different now: “Ruburt (Jane) is not myself now, in his present life. [...]

[...] (I wonder whether a long-term past-life sexual fantasy could be connected to a real sexual problem or challenge in a present—or future—life.)

[...] By its very nature a future life cannot be proven—records checked, and so forth. [...] It can even happen spontaneously, and I had a most exhilarating glimpse of a past life of my own that way. [...]

[...] [In the note she’s making for her Introduction to Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche, Jane describes a world view as “…a living psychological picture of an individual life, with its knowledge and experience, which remains responsive and viable long after the physical life itself is over.”]

(Long pause.) Whenever the conditions of life are such that its quality is threatened, there will be such a mass statement. The quality of life must be at a certain level so that the individuals of a species — of any and all species — can develop. [...]

[...] As I watched my father grow older, with an accompanying progressive loss of memory and function, I used to wonder why he didn’t consciously revise his response to life — and why I never saw any indication that he wanted to. I clearly sensed that it was possible for him to improve his beliefs about life, and that the benefits from such a course of action would be great. [...]

While each individual springs privately into the world at birth, then, each birth also represents quite literally an effort — a triumphant one — on the part of each member of each species, for the delicate balance of life requires for each birth quite precise conditions that no one species can guarantee alone, even to its own kind. [...]

[...] But now it seems that when science claims to understand the workings of a molecule of DNA, for example — the “master molecule” of life, as it’s often called — science then states that it’s stripped away the mystery of DNA and reduced our functions to easily understood mechanistic ones. But Jane and I maintain that grasping the marvelous workings of DNA should instead increase our sense of the wonder and mystery of life. The DNA lies exposed in all of its parts, but the questions about the life within it remain unanswered. [...]

[...] Then, however, many of you no longer rely upon the processes of life within you. [...] The religions do insist that man has a purpose, yet in their own confusion they often speak as if that purpose must be achieved by denying the physical body in which man has his life’s existence, or by “rising above” “gross, blunted,” earthly characteristics. [...]

[...] The idea of selfish genes also implies plan on the part of such entities — and so comes dangerously close to contradicting several basic tenets of science itself: among them that life arose by chance, that it perpetuates itself through random mutations and the struggle for existence (or natural selection), and that basically life has no meaning.

Growing from an infant to a full adult was probably one of the most difficult, and yet the most easy of feats that you will ever accomplish in a life. [...]

[...] Maybe the fire of my life was coming to its own natural conclusion. Why try to fan it into life again, particularly if its initial joy had forever vanished? Maybe that course was better than the determination and painful discomforts that might be necessary to prolong lifely existence. [...]

And to me this was no play but the main challenge—to discover while within one life all life’s meaning; to acquire in one life’s vulnerable swiftness evidence of eternity’s breadth and depth, to sniff out its extended unknown dimensions. [...]

[...] Therefore, a kind of momentary gap appeared between his life and his living of it—a pause and a hesitation became obvious between his life and what he should do with it, as his condition showed just before the hospital hiatus.

It’s impossible to present here all of Jane’s own material on her sinful self—much as I’d like to—but shortly I do want to give portions of the first few pages to show readers how experiences from one’s very early years can sometimes have the most profound effects in later life. [...] Certainly Jane chose all of her challenges in this life, just as I did, and as we believe each person does, but a major concomitant of focusing upon certain activities involves how one copes with them (often in close cooperation with others) as the years pass: What new and original depths of feeling and idea are uncovered, layer by layer, what insights, what rebellions, and, yes, what acceptances….

No matter how depressed you may feel, you do still want to live, or you would be dead by now — so there is a part of you that seeks life and vitality, and that portion also deserves expression. [...] If you commit suicide, however, your choices for this life are over.

[...] These same attitudes are apparent in a lesser degree to varying extents in periods of mental or bodily illness or in unsatisfactory life situations. [...]

The other creative, positive, achieving portions of life are ever present, and thoughts of them alone can bring refreshment and release from tension.

[...] Remind yourself that life implies action and motion, and even the activity of the most despondent thought flows in great bursts of rhythm.

[...] In the bookstore you felt that in a way the store was bigger than life, however, and in the granary dream Debbie’s drawings of you are idealistically bigger than life. They represent her version of your life and work. [...]

(8:32; eventually a one-minute pause.) The symptoms have served to “allow you” a certain privacy, A certain detachment from the world, while at the same time providing a way of relating to others, of sharing life’s misfortunes so that it might not be said, for example, that as artists or people you lived in an ivory tower, untouched by life’s usual dilemmas. [...]

[...] I realize that the very handicaps adopted could also be part of the given personality’s overall plan for life—contending with that as well as the gifts. [...]

[...] At certain levels (underlined), your brother Loren once compared your art to his love of trains—an enjoyable hobby, but not something to which a man devoted his life. [...]

[...] To a certain extent they become the invisible medium of experience from which your own specialized activities emerge, so that their nature is implied in your own life — and so that your life is implied in those other frameworks.

(11:35.) The life of a star, the life of a flower, are entirely different in your terms of duration, size, and characteristics; yet each exists in a validity of experience that ultimately makes such comparisons meaningless. [...]

When people profess an interest in the nature of dreams, they usually have certain set questions in mind, such as: “How real are dream events?” “What do dreams mean?” “How do they affect daily life?” Each person is aware of the astonishingly intimate nature of dreams. [...]

Pure energy, or any “portion” of it, contains within itself the creative propensity toward individuation, so that within any given portion all individually conscious life is implied, created, sustained. [...]

There is enough evidence to build an excellent case for life after death. [...] There is far more evidence for reincarnation and life after death than there is, for example, for the existence of black holes. [...]

[...] Now: Man’s first encounter with physical reality in life is his experience with the state of his own consciousness.

[...] He encounters his consciousness first, and then he encounters the world—so I am saying, of course, that each person has an identity that is larger than the framework of consciousness with which you are usually familiar in life.

[...] Therefore, dreams will be considered throughout the book in various capacities as they are related through genetics, reincarnation, culture, and private life. [...]

Twice a week when evening comes (as most of my readers know) while our neighbors go to movies, or shopping plazas, or just have friends in to watch television, I go into a trance,¹ “become” Seth, and take on a kind of a second life, or a life within a life. [...]

A DAY IN WHICH MAGIC COMES TO LIFE AND SETH DESCRIBES WHAT “THE MAGICAL APPROACH” TO LIFE IS

[...] Seth doesn’t answer mail though, or do any typing, and so as a result of those trance hours Rob and I spend a good deal of our conscious energy dealing one way or another with the effects of that trance life.

[...] That went without saying, but the way of relating to life would be completely different too; the way of dealing with problems or health difficulties; of achieving goals and so forth would be drastically different. [...]

Actually, I think that the selves we know in normal life are only the three-dimensional actualizations of other source-selves from which we receive our energy and life. [...]

The Nature of Personal Reality not only enriched my creative life but challenged my ideas and beliefs. [...] Certainly this book is an answer to all those who have written for help in applying Seth’s ideas to ordinary living, and I am certain that it will assist many people in dealing with the varied events and problems of daily life.

[...] Following this is the concept that the “point of power” is in the present, not in the past of this life or any other. He stresses the individual’s capacity for conscious action, and provides excellent exercises designed to show each person how to apply these theories to any life situation.

While Seth was producing this book, my own life was immeasurably enriched in unforeseen ways. [...]

What Seth is saying here is that the inner self uses this sense to initiate the birth of one of its personalities in physical life. [...]

This intuitional alertness carries over into daily life and into the sleeping state. [...]

[...] But you feel as if you have lived your life in a dream and are now awake. [...]

[...] They will automatically increase concentration and release abilities that will give daily life additional meaning, vitality, and purpose.

(In all the sessions Jane has given, this is but the third time that Seth has referred to past-life connections involving historical figures. [...]

In this life, or rather before incarnating in it, the personality then chose to purposely minimize the intellectual area; not, now, to punish himself, but to understand in and through an exaggerated form, the experience of those far less mentally gifted than himself.

[...] He did not choose to probe lightly or delicately, for example, various areas of experience, but chose instead to intensify each life.

[...] She must have faith that the life was chosen for a reason, and then the reasons will become at least understandable to her.

You felt that you wanted to give a life for the one you accidentally destroyed, but it need not have been the life of the same personality, had you chosen otherwise. You also still remember that the father of your child was a woman, and your sister, and so in this life you have found the relationship ambiguous.

Your child, in a past life, this child was an uncle, and in an accident you killed him. [...]

[...] While there was a past family connection, you were not the closest of friends, and there was no need or desire on either of your parts for a family connection of any duration in this life.

[...] She likes horses this life. [...]

[...] Yet by their nature such categories structure your experience of reality itself to such an extent that any alternate ways of perceiving life seem not only untrustworthy, but completely impossible.

[...] For example: No matter what information or data you receive as the result of animal experimentation or dissection for scientific purposes, and no matter how valuable the results appear to be, the consequences of such methods are so distorted that you comprehend less of life than you did before.

You must study the quality of life, dare to follow the patterns of your own thoughts and emotions, and to ride that mobility, for in that mobility there are hints of the origin of the universe and of the psyche. [...]

[...] You know that physically you will die, yet each person at one time or another is secretly sure that he or she will not meet such a fate, and that life is somehow eternal.

Now to some extent each person tests the nature of reality in each life for himself or herself, and also for the entire generation. How can life be made better? [...]

Marie also found peripheral relationships throughout later life, with nurses or attendants who turned into friends—and while her life certainly was not a happy one, it was not as tragic as it now seems to Ruburt to have been, so that the beneficial elements of that early background were used without quarreling, of course. [...]

(Slowly:) Ruburt’s mother chose her own life. [...]

[...] Ruburt has changed in many ways, but throughout Marie’s life, Marie changed relatively little—that is, any change was well with a certain recognizable scale. [...]

The conscious mind exists before material life and after it. In corporeal existence it is intertwined with the brain, and during physical life your earthly perceptions — your precise and steady focus within your particular space and time system — are dependent upon that fine alliance.

Now it is here that the seeming division in the self occurs, for in physical life the conscious mind must be connected with the brain, and in terms of time that organ itself must grow and develop. [...] The portion that must “wait for” the brain’s development is the part you call in life “the conscious mind.”

[...] While the condition of the body is directed by the conscious mind in life, then, the idea or mental pattern for the body existed before the conscious mind’s connection with the physical brain.

[...] It may seem to you that you do not have any conscious control over your body’s condition in life as you know it, much less before your birth. [...]