“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The stuff of the body should not be considered as some metaphysical result, then, but as a living gestalt of responsive flesh. Your body is composed of other living entities, in other words. Though you organize this living material it has its own right to fulfillment and existence. You are not a soul encased in inert clay.

There is no difference between the energy that shapes your ideas and the energy that grows a flower, or that heals your finger if you burn it. The soul does not exist apart from nature. It is not thrust into nature. Nature is the soul in flesh, in whatever its materializations. The flesh is as spiritual as the soul, and the soul is as natural as the flesh. In your terms the body is the living soul. Now the soul can live, and does, in many forms — some physical and some not, but while you are material, the body is the living soul. The body constantly heals itself, which means that the soul in the flesh heals itself. The body is often closer to the soul than the mind is because it automatically grows as a flower does, trusting its nature.

While it is true that the body is the living materialization of idea, it is also true that these ideas form an active, responsive, alive body. The body is not just a tool to be used. It is not just a vehicle for the spirit. It is the spirit in flesh. You impose your ideas upon it and largely affect its health and well-being through your conscious beliefs. But the body is composed of living, responding atoms and molecules. These have their own consciousnesses alive in matter, their drive to exist and be within the framework of their own nature. They compose the cells, and these combine to form the organs. The organs possess the combined consciousnesses of each of the cells within them, and in their way the organs sense their own identity.

THE LIVING FLESH

And amid all of this frenetic activity our painting and writing—those activities we’d always regarded as the creative hearts of our lives, the very reasons we’d chosen to live on earth this time around—had receded into a far distance, so that they’d become like dimly remembered dreams, or perhaps actions practiced in probable lives by “more fortunate” versions of ourselves.

[...] In this book, Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, for example, Seth portrays us as a vibrant, well-intended species—a physically attuned kind of consciousness beautifully tailored by our own cosmic ingredients to live lives of productivity, of spiritual and physical enjoyments, with each individual life in charge of its own fate and adding to the potentials of all other life as well.

As far as I can see, I’ve been living with two sets of “facts” for some years. [...] The same processes appeared in my husband Rob’s life, of course, as our lives seemed to impinge into the area of man’s greatest hopes, and into the opposite area of his greatest fears.

[...] This complicated enormously all of our efforts to help her move about the house as she used to in her office chair, which is on rollers, and nearly signaled the failure of our efforts to live by ourselves. [...] Neither of us wanted live-in help on the premises 24 hours a day. [...]

[...] I have simply lived before within your system and on your planet. [...] Both of these come from past experiences in other lives. The inner portions of your personality know the details of your past lives. The abilities that you have now have been developed in past lives. [...]

Your lives at this point are the results of your own inner expectations. If you do not like your lives, then examine your expectations. Your future lives will be the result of your own expectations again. [...]

[...] The lives that you have lived, in your terms, are still being lived. [...]

[...] All of you have lived before, and many of you will live in physical form again. [...]

[...] So the psyche holds equally lives in progress, lived or not yet lived, and deals with a greater perspective from which your ordinary perspective emerges.

[...] They highlight your lives, providing them also with a kind of frame. [...] Everything within the painting fits; so in your physical lives, you do the same thing.

[...] You are “between lives” and “in lives” at once. [...]

[...] Joseph knew that his brother lived as himself, and also as an Oriental, unknown to Joseph in his present life. [...] In your own lives you will use such psychic shorthand, or utilize symbols in which you try to explain the greater dimensions of one reality in terms of the known one.

[...] I think that when they blithely talk about having lived other lives people forget that those living before were—are—fully independent creatures, even if they are psychically related to others. [...] Interesting question: How would our 20th-century individual react when told by a visitor from the year 2355 (for example) that he or she represented one of our futurian’s “past” lives?

My main point is that I also feel, without having asked Seth, that the farther one travels ahead in time the greater the play of probable realities and probable lives he or she encounters. [...] 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. [...] Everything considered, we may just not want to know about future lives most of the time.

[...] The books and magazines dealing with reincarnation—and the tapes, too, these days—swarm with tales of journeys to past lives, and some of those accounts are most spectacular. [...] As a very perceptive young lady wrote Jane and me recently, why can’t people be progressed to their future lives just as successfully as they’re regressed to their past lives? [...]

However, Jane and I don’t particularly think that in our present lives we’ve been that greatly influenced by any successes, failures, or illnesses chosen from other lives except in the broadest of terms: general bodily and personality characteristics and abilities, say. [...] Perhaps we’re too stubborn about agreeing wholeheartedly that such possibilities exist, or perhaps we’re just too enamored of our “present” physical lives, even with all of our challenges, to want to fully concur with Seth.

[...] Seth then told Bill he saw him living until around 85, with Peggy equally old. Seth then told me I would live to be 87. This is the first time he has given me any specific age, although in several previous sessions, among them the 149th and the 217th, he has mentioned my living to an old age. [...] In our immediately past lives, spent mainly in Boston in pre-Civil War days, Jane lived to be 82 or 83 as a woman medium, and I lived to be 63 as an Episcopalian minister. We have received a limited amount of data on the Boston lives, and are not sure of our personal relationship, except that we were not man and wife. [...]

[...] I should add here that the 105th session dealt with the death of Jane’s mother, as well as Jane living to an advanced age. [...]

(Seth also agreed with me concerning my memory of earlier sessions in which he stated she would live to old age. [...]

[...] After saying that Jane would live into her eighties also, he said that we would be instrumental in offering conclusive evidence for the survival of the personality after physical death. [...]

In your terms and in your probability, your parents’ lives are over, completed, and when in your reality you paint a picture it is finished, completed; and yet even in that context it outlives your completion of it, and endures. Surely lives are as important as paintings, and as such multidimensional creations far outlast the paintings that are representations of the life you know.

When you have completed a life then it is as if you have finished a living portrait of yourself, using the mediums of space and time. [...] The memories and realities within that portrait are yours to learn from and to use as a model for other such living portraits in time and space.

[...] Some paint living portraits of themselves in peaceful times and places. Each living self-artist however tries to create the inner self in the material world, and each such portrait is indeed unique.

There are masters in living as there are the Old Masters of painting. [...]

[...] Others have a series of female lives and then a series of male lives, or vice versa, but the entire reincarnational framework must involve both sexual experiences.

[...] As mentioned earlier, many personalities adopt different kinds of experiences, focusing upon development in certain specific areas, and ignoring others perhaps for a series of lives.

[...] These two factors together can release you from any difficulties that have arisen in past lives. [...]

[...] There is an overall pattern to relationships within lives, and yet this does not mean that you travel through various existences with the same limited and familiar number of friends and acquaintances, merely altered like actors with a change of face or costume.

[...] Often I felt sorry for the other tenants in the big old apartment house we live in on West Water Street, in Elmira, New York. Our good friend Leonard Yaudes, who lives directly below us on the first floor, would sometimes leave the house on class nights. [...]

[...] During break Lydia told us that she had lived in Bangor as a preschool child, and had been very attached to Maine; so much so that when she left there and moved to New York State, she at first refused to say she lived in New York State. [...]

When I tell you that you lived for example in 1936, I say this because it makes sense to you now; but you live all of your reincarnations at once. [...]

[...] You are ready to learn about your past lives, and to prepare for your future ones. [...]

[...] In man’s very early history, however, and in your terms for centuries after the “awakening,” as described in our book, people lived in good health for much longer periods of time—and in certain cases they lived for several centuries.¹ No one had yet told them that this was impossible, for one thing. [...]

[...] Beliefs about the dishonor of age often cause people to make the decision—sometimes quite consciously—to bring their own lives to an end before the so-called threshold is reached. Whenever, however, the species needs the accumulated experience of its own older members, that situation is almost instantly reversed and people live longer.

[...] Did Adam really live for 930 years, or Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, for 912? (Why isn’t Eve’s age given in the Bible?) Enoch, the fifth elder listed after Seth, lived for a mere 365 years, but sired Methuselah, who at 969 years is the oldest individual recorded in the Bible. [...]

In Genesis 11, the listing of Abraham’s ancestors begins after the Flood with the oldest son of Noah, Shem, living some 600 years. Generally, Abraham’s forebears didn’t live as long as Adam’s descendants had, although after Shem their ages still ranged from 148 years to 460. [...]

[...] As before, we sat in our living room, with the shades pulled and a couple of soft lights on, trying to duplicate the atmosphere of our first session. [...]

(“Have you had other lives here on earth, Frank Watts?”)

(“When did you live on earth for the first time?”)

(“Frank Watts, do you recall all of your previous lives, where you are now?”)

[...] I would like you to attend to your lives as they otherwise appear before you, for a period of time to return to sessions because of your natural living curiosity and involvement with them, and to attend most of all to creative thought as it naturally makes itself known. [...]

(Very long pause.) The small directions I have just given also in their way serve as excellent prescriptions, of course, for daily living. [...]

[...] They exist as a kind of faulty sentence construction in a paragraph of living experience that you keep going back to, persistently trying to improve it. [...]

[...] In the meantime the massage can indeed benefit (long pause), for the two women do indeed allow a free expression of healing love to direct their lives, so that their touch is of itself soothing and healing, and carries certain important messages. [...]

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 would be even more difficult to try to handle the information of many lives at one time. [...] The inner knowledge of all of your lives, from your point of view, is in the same category as those automatic processes that underlie your existence.

[...] It sees where and how your many lives fit together. [...]

That is, you know about your other lives, basically, in the same way that you know how to breathe or digest your food. [...]

[...] During break Lillian told us that she had lived in Bangor as a preschool child, and had been very attached to Maine; so much so that when she left there to move to New York State, she at first refused to say she lived in NYS. [...]

When I tell you that you have lived for example in 1936, I say this because it makes sense to you now; but you live all of your reincarnations at once. [...]

[...] You are ready to learn about your past lives and to prepare for your future ones. [...]

All of you were meant to come here and your lives have already been changed. [...]

Have you lived before, and will you live again? According to Seth all of us have been reincarnated, and when we are finished living our series of earthly lives, we will continue to exist in other systems of reality. [...]

[...] If we lived before, I thought, and if we can’t remember, then what good does it do? “Besides,” I said to Rob, “Seth says that we live in the ‘Spacious Present,’ and that there really isn’t any past, present, and future. So how can we live one life ‘before’ another?”

“He wanted to give you an impetus, and his effect was far stronger than had he lived, and he knew this. He had a horror of living to young malehood for he did not want to meet a young woman, become attracted, and continue with another physical life.

Seth gave more information concerning the past lives of all involved, then added, “I am giving you what I believe is the most important information, whether you can check it out or not. … Your inner selves digest what I have said, and this is more important than ten pages of notes and dates that you cannot check, since these lives were so long ago.”

Seth had often told us that when we’re finished with our lives here, we’re actually anxious to leave this existence. [...] The instinct for survival is served quite well, because the inner self knows that it lives beyond death. [...] In theory it sounded fine, but naturally I knew he wanted Sally to live. [...]

[...] For example, how many lives do we live? [...] Quite simply, we live as many physical existences as we feel we must in order to develop our abilities and prepare ourselves to enter other dimensions of reality. [...]

“She lived in Mesopotamia before it was known by that name. Here we find abilities shown, ignored, and misused through a succession of lives; a rather classic example of the ‘progress’ followed by many psychically endowed, but in poor control of their personalities and abilities.

[...] “Then how come he talks about reincarnational lives or a series of lives one before the other? [...]

[...] It can live its lives as it sees fit within the guidelines. [...]

[...] This does not mean that an equal number of male and female lives must be lived. [...]

Reincarnational experiences are a part of the framework of the self, a facet of the multidimensional reality of the living psyche. [...]

The animus and the anima become even more important in these instances when a series of one-sex lives are chosen. [...]

Without his blocking therefore, he would have access to the previous three lives that he has lived, and in detail. And since his abilities are strong, he would also have access to your previous three lives, since he picks up much information from you telepathically.

Like the fossilized layers within the physical earth, so do the subconscious layers hold intact the traces of an individual’s past lives. And as your physical eras of time may be deduced through studying the physical fossilized layers of rock, so can the time and place of past lives be deduced through studying the layers of the subconscious.

[...] What psychologists do not understand, however, is that in deep levels of subconscious activity associations may spring from the inner self’s latent knowledge and experience of past lives.

[...] It is theoretically possible, for example, to change the focus, to delve downward as it were two lives back, and look upward from that perspective to the present.

[...] You have lived before and will live again, and when you are done with physical existence, you will still live.

[...] The people involved didn’t attend the sessions since they lived in other parts of the country, yet they said the advice helped them; information given concerning individual backgrounds was correct. Seth often explained problems as the result of unresolved stresses in past reincarnational lives, and gave specific advice as to how the individuals could use their abilities now to meet these challenges.

[...] Though Seth has appeared only once in a physical materialization, Rob has seen him clearly enough to paint a portrait of him that hangs in our living room (see the illustrated section). [...] I know many “living” persons who haven’t produced that much in a lifetime. [...]

The first chapters of this book will deal with the emergence of Seth’s personality and the impact he had on our lives as we tried to understand what was happening. [...] Never in our lives had we found ourselves so caught between curiosity and caution, so fascinated and baffled.

[...] Some people, having lived lives believing in one religious system or another, being completely immersed in them, give themselves shock treatments of sorts, then, living lives in which they believe in nothing, or at least freeing themselves from any beliefs—only to discover, of course, that a belief in nothing is the most confining belief of all. [...]

There are those who overrelied upon religious beliefs, using them as crutches, and in [later lives] then, they might—such people—throw those crutches away overreacting to their newfound “freedom”; and through living lives as meaningless they then realize, after death, that the meaningfulness of existence was after all not dependent upon any religious system. [...]

[...] Some people have built careers around negative beliefs like that, and Jane and I were wondering how they react after physical death, when they discover that they still live—that they may have spent their professional lives maintaining belief systems which after death they begin to understand are quite wrong. [...]

Genetic dreams of one kind or another continue throughout your lives, whether or not you are consciously aware of them. [...]