“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Framework 2 involves a far vaster creative activity, in which your life is the art involved — and all [of the] ingredients for its success are there, available. When you are creating a product or a work of art, the results will have much to do with your ideas of what the product is, or what the work of art is — so your ideas about your life, or life itself, will also have much to do with your experience of it as a living art.

[...] You will believe that you must use them in order to, say, paint the living portrait of your life. [...] You will not have the “technique” to attract other experience, and as long as you stick with one technique your life-pictures will more or less have a certain monotony.

[...] Not just technique is concerned, but the entire visual experience of his life.

[...] In your life you are writing sentences like “See Tommy run.” [...]

[...] Therefore, you may be punished in this life for errors you have committed in a past one, or you may actually be making up for a mistake made thousands of years ago. Again, all of a person’s reincarnational existences are, indeed, connected — but the events in one life do not cause the events in the next one.

(4:16.) Another life, for example, might deal with exquisite health and vitality, and as mentioned, still another life might be devoted to the arts of healing — but overall, few people take health problems per se as frequent reincarnational themes, though they may be implied strongly in situations where one is born into a large populace of poor, underprivileged people.

Many proponents of reincarnation believe most firmly that an illness in one life most frequently has its roots in a past existence, and that reincarnational regression is therefore necessary to uncover the reasons for many current illnesses or dilemmas.

Each life, regardless of its nature, possesses it own unique vantage point, and an individual may sometimes take an obscure or a long-lasting disease simply to present himself or herself with experience that most others would shun. [...]

[...] An individual can possess wealth and health, can enjoy satisfying relationships, and even fulfilling work, and yet live a life devoid of the kind of drama of which I speak — for unless you feel that life itself has meaning, then each life must necessarily seem meaningless, and all love and beauty end only in decay.

[...] Little if anything is said about the personality’s innate need to feel that his life has purpose and meaning. [...]

[...] His true instincts lead him spontaneously toward the desire to better the quality of his own life and that of others. [...]

When you believe in a universe accidentally formed, and when you think you are a member of a species accidentally spawned, then private life seems devoid of meaning, and events can seem chaotic. [...]

Basically speaking, there are only life forms. Through their cooperation your entire world sustains its reality, substance, life, and form. If there were no diseases as you think of them, there would be no life forms at all. [...] The conscious withdrawal of mental life during life makes normally conscious experience possible. In the same way there must, of course, be a rhythm of physical death, so that the experience of normal physical life is possible. [...]

(4:30.) For all of man’s fear of disease, however, the species has never been destroyed by it, and life has continued to function with an overall stability, despite what certainly seems to be the constant harassment and threat of illness and disease. [...]

[...] So-called states of health and disease are also changing constantly — and in those vaster terms disease in itself is a kind of health, for it makes life and health itself possible (all quite intently).

[...] They are also a sign, therefore, of life’s vitality, and are in themselves often responsible for a return to health when they act as learning communications.

If death disappeared on your planet even an hour all of life would soon be threatened. And if all life possible suddenly emerged at once, then most surely all would be annihilated. We must admit, then, that death is indeed a part of life — and even more, we must say that death is healthy.

[...] There are people who must feel themselves to be at the brink of death before they can fully appreciate the quality of life. There are people who cannot appreciate or enjoy the satisfaction of life or of happiness unless faced simultaneously with the threat of death or intense pain.

At first thought, it certainly seems as if people love life and fear death — that they seek pleasure and avoid pain.

[...] Because of death, life is possible, so these two seemingly opposite qualities are simply different versions of the same phenomena.

[...] In a way she wants to be free of the house of life that she has literally formed, to find a new endeavor … to begin anew. [...] She also wants to begin a new life.

[...] In waking life you test your ideas in the world of facts. [...]

[...] In other words, in most dreams data is still being received and interpreted in the light of corporeal life. [...]

Beyond this there are experiences but seldom recalled, in which the usual identification of your consciousness with physical-life orientation is gone. [...]

(“You chose your father in this life because in many ways you were like him as Nebene. [...] You also picked your father so you could watch a family situation under those terms, because you knew you weren’t going to have any children in this life. [...]

[...] The two of you, now, chose that aspect of your lives together in this life, to help you understand the meaningful relationship between spontaneity as connected with the emotions and creativity, and discipline as connected with the intellectual: to feel and understand the creative tension that connects them both, to learn the personal aspects of emotional relationships as they affect others, and the reflection of the emotions into creative endeavor. You served to help Ruburt find in this life direction. [...]

[...] The girl’s name was Sharabena, and she was Jane in that life as I was Nebene.

[...] Whenever I mention a “past life,” this is what I actually mean. [...]

[...] At each of these points, what seems to be an isolated life is experienced. [...] This represents the multidimensional entity that is both apart from and yet part of the separate life-traces. [...] To you it would appear that the life was a past one, finished. You may believe that your current existence, with all of its abilities and challenges, is the result of that past life, yet both exist at once. [...]

[...] Within that system then it leaves a life-trace. When you think in terms of reincarnation it seems that one tracing exists before the other, but the entire “chart” exists at once, with all the individual life-tracings.

[...] (Slowly:) You must remember that beginnings and endings are realities only within your own system of three-dimensional life.

(Long pause.) Since these offshoots or life-tracings each come from your entity, they are connected psychologically and in terms of electromagnetic energy patterns. [...]

[...] “I never could believe that the first few years of a person’s life could have that much of an effect upon the rest of the person’s life. It doesn’t seem right, or natural, that an individual might have to spend say fifty years suffering in life for things that happened to him when he was a child, say; I don’t think nature would arrange things that way—it’s too self-defeating....” [...]

[...] You felt sometimes as if you wanted to spy upon life, observe it rather than live it directly. This was not because you were afraid of life (as I often wondered when I was younger), but because your purposes and intents were different. [...]

[...] (Long pause.) There were certain deep questions about life, certain pressing problems about man’s condition, with which you felt you had little experience, since your primary goals had been to examine life, to stand apart from it to study it, And therefore you both felt that you had few of the same concerns as those that led other people (quietly intent). [...]

[...] It seems that in recent years one of my main goals in life has been to pare down—or eliminate outright—a number of ideas and obligations and hassles that I’d finally realized weren’t worth the time to retain. [...] Now, I told her, I want to spend my time on the few things I consider important in life.)

(9:55.) Give us a moment… What I have said about viruses applies to all biological life. [...] Their scale of life varies considerably, and some can be inactive for centuries, and revive. [...] They are in many ways the basis of biological life, but you are aware of them only when they show “a deadly face.”

[...] From Seth she then picked up material to the effect that “time was in the present to the cat … in a way its life was eternal to it, whether it lived 10 months or 10 years, or whatever.” At the time (she wrote later for me) emotionally she objected strenuously to that message of Seth’s, since “it seemed too easy a way to sign off a cat’s life — or any other life — even if it was true. [...]

From Session 837 for February 28, held on the evening of the day Billy died: “My dear friends: Existence is larger than life or death. Life and death are both states of existence. An identity exists whether it is in the state of life or in the state of death. [...]

1. We were shocked because Billy’s unexpected — and serious — illness reminded us of the almost universally accepted view that life is terribly vulnerable. Any kind of life. [...]

The poems show my attitude toward life in general just before my psychic experiences began. [...] The way I saw life was the way life was! [...]

[...] Even when I wrote The Seth Material, I didn’t clearly understand why it happened or connect it in any way with my previous life or beliefs. [...] And it was through reading this old poetry that I found clues that showed me the points of continuity between my life before my psychic initiation and after it.

A small household tragedy, the death of a cat, yet to me it contained the question of the uniqueness of life and the value of consciousness. [...] Yet either all life was sacred, or none of it was. [...]

[...] Instead, the theories were made manifest in my life, becoming facts of my existence. [...] That experience, then, led to the sessions and to this book, containing enough energy and motive force not only to change my life but also to affect the experience of others.

(To Jason.) This lovely lady here was also involved with you in the life of which I spoke and the life of which you did not ask. Now, the very fact that you did not ask about the life is rather significant. [...]

[...] It has to do with that life and also a Danish life in which both of them were involved, and where this one’s mother was an older brother. [...] The conflict existing had to do with this episode as well as the episode from the past life. [...]

[...] You have taken them for granted as beginning in this life and as a result of this life’s experience. [...]

[...] You do not have all of your reincarnational backgrounds and one life in particular may surprise you considerably. [...]

You want to examine life, to experience it, and yet in some way find in time a safe dimension apart from time. What you want is a second life in life, in which to appreciate and examine life’s experience. The ordinary distractions of life immediately then cause conflict. [...] They are life. On the other hand, they rob you in time of that second life you want, in which to examine your experiences.

[...] At the same time he often feels the need to stand apart from life, from the fleeting thoughts, the daffodils or the insight, so that he will not be lost completely in the moment, but able to form almost a second self with a larger viewpoint, who can then more clearly examine and understand the thought, the moment, or the insight.

The creative artist can be afraid of letting himself go completely in his life, for fear that he will become so involved that he will forget to stand apart, to look or to listen. [...]

[...] It can be a joyful exercise of the body, the natural life being reinforced, and it can also provide feelings of timelessness, so that in that regard your love of timelessness can be combined with your love of the moment.

It is useless then to say, “When this life is over I will look back upon my experience and mend my ways.” [...] You are setting the stage for your “next” life now. [...]

(Pause at 11:13.) Hate is powerful if you believe in it, and yet though you hate life, you will continue to exist. [...] In many cases the friends that you make were close to you long before you met them in this present life.

Those who do not take advantage of such opportunities in this life often do not do so when it is over. [...]

[...] Any successes in this life, any abilities, have been worked out through past experience. [...]

[...] Some others’ are exclamation points, so that later it can be said that the person’s death loomed almost greater in importance than the life itself. 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. [...] They are often idealists, who beneath it all — beneath the enthusiasm, the intelligence, and sometimes beneath extraordinary ability — still feel that life could no more than sully those abilities, dampen those spiritual winds, and darken that promise that could never be fulfilled.

We will shortly return to a discussion of such “causes,” and their relationship with the person’s feeling that life has or does not have a meaning.

[...] Disappointments, conflicts, and feelings of powerlessness can begin to make unfortunate inroads in the personalities of those who believe that life itself has little meaning. [...]

[...] Its import varies according to the individual — and in a certain fashion, death is your last chance to make a statement of import in any given life, if you feel you have not done so earlier.

Any scientist who believes that life has no meaning has simply provided himself with what he thinks of as an unfailing support against life’s vicissitudes. If he says: “Life has no meaning,” he cannot be disappointed if such is the case, for he is ensconced in a self-created cocoon that has meaning (underlined), because it provides a cushion against his deepest fears (all very intently).

[...] That cooperation goes unnoticed, largely, yet it rests firmly upon the stability that is characteristic within all life. [...]

[...] I use the word mental, meaning that all species possess their own kinds of interior mental life, as opposed to the physical characteristics of plants or animals with which you are familiar. [...]

[...] Whatever errors that you have made, or gross distortions, even those exist because of your need to find meaning [in] your private existence and [in] life itself.

(4. Seth also said that it would be “not practical” and “boring” for him to relive his life as a pope, then added: “In those terms, many people do choose to reexperience what you would think of as a past existence in order to change it as they go along.” Yet this reexperiencing of a life is a different thing from the original one. Again in Seth Speaks, see Seth’s material at 10:07 in the 539th session for Chapter 10: “You may perfect [that past life], in other words, but you cannot again enter into that frame of reference as a completely participating consciousness — following — say, the historic trends of the time, joining into the mass-hallucinated existence that resulted from the applied consciousness of your self and your ‘contemporaries.’”

If you think in conventional terms about reincarnation, then you might examine a book in which each page is a life. You read the book from the beginning, so you think of one life or page following another. [...]

(3. On his life as a minor pope in the fourth century A.D.: “I was a petty, religious politician.” [...]

[...] I am myself … You are death and you are life … Ruburt can do many things that surprise me — that I did not do in my past, for remember that fresh creativity emerges from the past also, as in [Ruburt’s novel] Oversoul Seven. [...]

[...] This evening John asked Jane if Seth could say something about why Peg had followed, or chosen, such a role in this physical life—a role seemingly without reward or hope; she has multiple sclerosis.

[...] The woman, in a past life, was once a man (pause), Italian, in a hill village. [...]

This father had a later life, and a very successful one also in Italy, in a town badly bombed in the Second World War. [...]

In this existence however the personality of its own free will chose to understand in a different context, and work out problems faced so poorly in the earlier life. [...]

So, while each action of your life is taken in context with all other actions of your life until your death, this does not mean that your death is predestined to occur at any given time. As you might change your sentence in the middle from one version to another without even being consciously aware of it, so as you live your life you also work with probabilities. You are the self who speaks the sentence, and you are the self who lives the life. You are larger than the sentence that you speak, and larger than the life you live.

[...] The “future” history of the world, for example, is worked out now, as in the dream state each individual works with the probable events of private life. That private life exists, however, in a context — social, political, and economic — which is unconsciously apprehended. [...]

[...] Any one action in your life is taken in context with all of the other events from your birth to your death. [...]

[...] Your consciousness is cellularly-attuned in life, in that it perceives its own reality through cellular function that forms the bodily apparatus. [...]

(All intently:) As your life is provided for you, so to speak, by these spontaneous processes, the life of the universe is provided in the same fashion. [...]

(4:24.) Value fulfillment of each and every element in life relies upon those spontaneous processes, and at their source is the basic affirmative love and acceptance of the self, the universe, and life’s conditions.

[...] The same applies to all of those inner processes that make life possible. [...]

[...] Spontaneity, however, represents the spirit of life itself, and it is the basis for the will to live, and for those impulses that stimulate action, motion, and discovery.