“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When Jane began delivering the Seth material in 1963, I became very conscious of the record we’d leave, not with Seth but concerning our private lives. [...] Hardly an original idea, yet one that I often see ignored in the surface activities of our daily lives. Other facets of our physical and nonphysical lives could help us tremendously if more conscious attention was given to them, regardless of “when” they happened.

Our lives, I’ve learned, don’t simply proceed nicely and directly from “birth” to “death.” [...]

[...] She could have lived for another 20 years, say, and contributed even more to our knowledge, both with Seth and by herself. [...]

[...] How can we become more keenly aware of the facts and implications of our dreams, for example, and the very great influences they exert in our lives? [...]

(“How many times have you lived on earth?”)

3 lives.

(“In what century did I live?”)

(“Can you tell me how my husband made his living?”)

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

[...] My material will indeed change your lives. [...]

You hope, you dream, that your lives will be creative... [...]

[...] I can assure you that your parents will live. [...]

[...] The world view of every creature that has ever lived continues to exist, and can be tuned into under certain conditions. So can the psychic patterns of those now living, and even of those not yet born. [...]

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. [...] I live daily with the proposition that my wife is in the process of making profound decisions, and that once she’s made them she’ll respond accordingly both physically and mentally.

[...] Many questions arise: Even granting our personal reservations about influences being exerted within our current lives through past, future, as well as other present existences, what about exchanges on dream levels concerning Jane’s symptoms between or among any of our reincarnational selves, our counterpart selves, or various combinations of the two? [...]

Actually, of course, each second of any creature’s life represents a creative act of the keenest sort, for it signals that physical entity’s decision to continue living in physical terms. [...]

[...] You are looking for better ways to live your lives, seeking a larger framework of existence. [...]

(Long pause.) To some extent it means that you try to live your lives in accord with a philosophy not yet completed, methods not yet completely achieved or stated, and this of course involves you with uncertainty. [...]

[...] Now in matters of personal health, this is bound to add to the uncertainty: you are trying to live your lives according to new rules that are as yet not completely given, so to that extent it is somewhat natural that Ruburt and you become at times uneasy, wonder at times about the personal material, wonder if it is distorted in those areas, or whatever—and there are no known ways to check such material—the material itself is that original. [...]

[...] It seemed to offer a dependable framework to keep him from going too far in one direction or the other (intently), and was used as a cushion against the other uncertainties in your lives. [...]

[...] Venice said that Martha had lived on Grand Island in Buffalo. [...]

I have a connection with Martha and water, perhaps because you told me she lived on Grand Island, or perhaps this is an indication of a street name such as Lake Avenue, Water Street, etc.

[...] She lived both in Rochester and Winchester.

Very old woman lived there, a relative, like a great grandmother, or great aunt perhaps.

[...] Florence said that Martha had lived on Grand Island in Buffalo. [...]

I have a connection with Martha and water, perhaps because you told me she lived on Grand Island, or perhaps this is an indication of a street name such as Lake Ave, Water St., etc. [...]

[...] She lived both in Rochester and Winchester.)

Very old woman lived there, a relative, like a great grandmother, or great aunt perhaps. [...]

(We were visited over the weekend by Robert Monroe and his wife, Nancy; they live on a farm in central Virginia. [...]

(“Sunday afternoon before our visitors came,” she wrote, “I’d begun reading a book by Ralph Waldo Emerson [the poet and philosopher who lived from 1803–82]. [...]

Do the Speakers live?

Their massive lives straddle ours,

Now this is a living endeavor, and therefore we take advantage of those happenings in your own lives, and it was I myself who prompted Ruburt to pick up the book (containing Jung) in the first place.

[...] Various types of bodies may be chosen, but there will still be overall preferences on the part of the whole self, and characteristics that will lead the whole self, so that generally the various lives lived will still have their own individual flavor.

[...] But then such events in our own lives have influenced every other chapter in the book, too. [...]

[...] Jane’s eyes were wide and dark, her delivery lively; it was easy to sense the immediacy of Seth’s presence. [...]

[...] I am saying that the quality of your lives is far more satisfying in comparison to others’ than you realize, and that the kind of experience you have chosen offers the most productive challenges. You always have something to look forward to, clearer insight, the closest approximation to truth that you might attain, where many others live in a maze, in which it seems (pause) that any hope of effecting change is literally impossible, privately.

[...] She realized that she was reacting to what she’d taken to be all of the negative suggestions and circumstances surrounding Bill and Ida’s lives and beliefs. [...]

[...] They did what they thought they were supposed to do, but do not feel nearly the sense of accomplishment or pleasure with their lives that they once expected. [...]

[...] It seemed to him, with the force of old beliefs, that Ida, Richard and the children were indeed driven willy-nilly by contradictory impulses, and that their lives lack any organizing inner purpose.

[...] Their feelings can run something like this: “If I’m meant to live, these drugs won’t hurt me, and if I’m meant to die, what difference does it make what I take?” They are taking a certain kind of chance with their own lives, however — those who indulge in such activities — and the stakes can be high.

(Long pause at 3:26.) The will to live is also inbred into each element of nature, and if you trust your own spontaneity, then that will to be is joyfully released and expressed through all of your activities. [...]

The more fully you learn to live, the more the seemingly hidden “mysteries of the universe” begin to appear. [...]

[...] To a strong extent, such individuals reject their own lives, and often the conditions of life in general. [...]

[...] To a certain extent you do carry the knowledge of your forefathers within your [cells’] chromosomes,¹ which present a pattern that is not rigid but flexible — one that in codified fashion endows you with the subjective living experience of those who, in your terms, have gone before. [...] A completely different kind of focus was presented, in which the ancestors were understood to contribute to the “new” experience of the living; one in which the physically focused consciousness clearly saw itself as perceiving the world for itself, but also for all of those who had gone before — (gradually louder for emphasis:) while realizing that in those terms he or she would contribute as well as the generations past.

[...] So you can theoretically expand your consciousness to include the knowledge of your past lives, though those lives were yours and not yours. [...]

The animals were also accepted in this natural philosophy of selfhood as the individual plainly saw the living quality of consciousness. [...]

(With emphasis:) I am not saying, for example, that the living consciousness of each individual returned to the earth literally, but that the physical material permeated and stamped with that consciousness did, and does. [...]

[...] In a manner of speaking, future lives are not “there” as completed entities to be grasped, either. It is most difficult to explain, since all lives are being creatively formed simultaneously. [...]

This does not mean that those other lives are subordinate. Other entities might spread their creativity and focus more equally over many lives. [...]

[...] In a way, the idea of past reincarnations often gives a feeling of support of past lives accomplished.

The idea of future lives brings into consideration certain emotions—man’s fear of the future, for he is often afraid of what tomorrow will bring. [...]

[...] I told you that you possessed far more knowledge about your own lives, and the lives of others, than you were intellectually aware of.² You act on that knowledge, for one thing, when you are born physically, when you grow. [...]

(Late last week Tam Mossman called Jane to tell her that he’s begun work on her contract for the publication of If We Live Again. [...]

(Pause.) Some years ago, Ruburt had an experience in which he glimpsed in the center of the living room a strange form. [...]

[...] It means that you live “in a state of grace.”³ You can be unaware of that state. [...]

In the past also, even in your country, there were convents and monasteries for those who did not want to live in the world as other people did. They might pursue other goals, but the decisions of where to live, what to do, where to go, how to live, would be made for them. [...]

[...] We talked about why people would choose to live in a region where it’s practically certain that such storms will materialize every year. Our questions would also apply to living in any dangerous environment on the planet, of course.

There was some hope, at least, in looking for better living conditions personally. [...]

[...] They had no cause to live for, because their idealism became so separated from any particular actualization that they were left only with its ashes.

The rearousal of love might well activate Framework 2 to such an extent that the healing energies become unblocked, and send their threads of probable actions into the person’s living situation as well — that is, once the channels to Framework 2 are open, then new possibilities immediately open up in all of life’s living areas. [...]

Again, every effort should be made to insert humor into the living situation as much as possible.

Whenever possible, it is far better for the patient to remain home, rather than live steadily at a hospital. [...]

[...] They may feel that their lives are being disrupted through no cause of their own, yet be so ashamed of such feelings that they dare not express them.

[...] Your lives in many ways did not satisfy you, but rather than accept this fact clearly and cast about for what changes or solutions there might be, both of you tried to keep everything precisely (underlined) as it was, make no changes, and live with the dissatisfaction that became a constant inner problem.

[...] You were not living clearly in the sensual, physical world, in that large amounts of energy were being used to repress physical communication.

You went to some good degree toward breaking some of those patterns last evening and today, but the issues of your lives should be clearly discussed and not hidden. [...]

[...] But all of the symptoms now represent aspects of your lives that you have not faced in a normal above-the-board fashion. [...]

[...] I do admire that intense focus, that wholehearted commitment, and history offers plenty of examples—famous, too, if you will —of gifted individuals who lived their lives that way and made great contributions....

[...] You will compare your own life and work often in a critical fashion to artists who were obsessed with one art from the beginning of their lives, or who pursued what is really a kind of straight and undeviating course—a brave courageous one, perhaps, and highly focused, but one that must be in certain respects (underlined) limited in scope and complexity, not crossing any barriers except those that seem to occur strictly within painting’s realm itself (all intently. [...]

[...] Part of your accomplishment lies in our sessions and your own considerable work with the notes, and with the invisible aura contained in those notes, for there in a different way you are painting a portrait—a portrait of two lives from a highly individualistic standpoint, extremely unique—and that is the kind of experience that would be ripped out of your life’s fabric, were you the hypothetical idealized version with whom you sometimes relate—a version highly romanticized, let me add. [...]

[...] You should always address yourself to the natural person, and when Ruburt becomes confused about images, it is because he is relating himself to other composite versions that he thinks he should live up to. [...]

[...] They die when they see no reason to live, yet they seed other civilizations. [...] That organism is intimately connected to the natural biological state of each other person, and to each other living thing, or entity, however minute.

You live in a physical community, but you live first of all in a community of thoughts and feelings. [...]

[...] Animals stricken by kitten and puppy diseases, for example, choose to die, pointing out the fact that the quality of their lives individually and en masse is vastly lacking. [...] An unloved animal does not want to live.

“They may have been ‘cured’ whether or not they had treatment, and gone on to lead productive lives. [...] Your problem there rests with the will to live, and with the mechanisms of the psyche.”

[...] Disastrous events thought to originate in a god’s wrath could at least be understood in that context, but many of you live in a subjective world in which the events of your lives appear to have no particular reason — or indeed sometimes seem to happen in direct opposition to your wishes….

[...] 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.

What kind of events can people form when they feel powerless, when their lives seem robbed of meaning — and what mechanics lie behind those events?