“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

My lives as monks followed my experience as a pope, and in one of these, I was a victim of the Spanish Inquisition. My experience in female lives varied from that of a plain Dutch spinster to a courtesan at the time of the biblical David, to several existences as a humble mother with children.

On a subjective level I acted as a teacher and a Speaker in each of my lives. [...] So I became highly proficient in this way as a Speaker and a teacher in several lives that were externally uninteresting by contrast.

(10:11.) While I was not literate, I was shrewd and lively of mind. [...]

At the time that Christ lived his existence was known to very few, comparatively speaking. [...]

[...] The intimate “trivial” events of life are life—they are living, in your terms. This means that housekeeping and life’s daily chores are a mark of the living vitality of the moment—a mark of physical life as you know it. [...]

In your terms, the ideal itself arises because of the intimate daily chores and activities of living; the sacredness of the body’s motion and all of those questions that arise between its motion and the time when it will be silent. [...]

But first: One day in late November 1963, Jane sat at her writing table in the living room while I left to paint in my studio at the back of the apartment. [...] After some time on that particular day I realized that all was quiet—too quiet—out there in the living room. When I went out to see what Jane was up to I was greeted with her breakthrough accomplishment—one that, to put it mildly, was to lead to very unexpected challenges and growths in our lives: Jane held up a sheaf of typewriter paper upon which she had scribbled in large handwriting an essay that had come to her as fast as she could write it down: The Physical Universe as Idea Construction. [...]

A strong saving grace in all of the personal and household turmoil she lived in, Jane told me often, was her relationship with her maternal grandfather, Joseph Burdo, her “Little Daddy,” as she called him because of his diminutive size. [...] However, extremely inarticulate in his last life, due to an inability to synthesize gains in past lives… That is, in his feeling of unity with All That Is, he excluded other human beings....” He lived alone in rented rooms and worked at various jobs in town; he was a doorman, a watchman. [...]

[...] But now we were there on its grounds, focusing upon that precious symbol where Jane and I had lived for 15 years. [...] The sounds of our voices were crowded; the space we stood in seemed to be so confining, with the doors at each end, that I marveled that my dear wife and I had lived in the house for all that time. [...] Apartment 4 was empty; its door was on a short chain that let me push it open a bit to peek into a now-deserted living room that Jane and I had known so well.

[...] I worried about being an intruder into the domain of the people who lived in those dingy apartments now. [...] A friend of ours had lived in that apartment (and I still correspond with him). [...] The tin-covered roof had born layers of old vines that had climbed up the pillars from our living-room windows on the second floor. [...]

“The statue of the deer represents that idealistic image of the past; finding it broken in Brenner’s yard connects its real environment where Rob lived as a small boy [on Harrison Street] to Wilbur Avenue where he lived later; meaning that he’d idealized both backgrounds. The statue of the deer, an inanimate animal, contrasts with the waste left by a living animal. Idealized ones, statues, don’t leave waste, but they don’t live either.

“In vivid color: I lived in my parents’ house at 704 North Wilbur Avenue, in Sayre, Pennsylvania. [...] That the house had long been sold, that my parents had died in the early 1970s, and that Jane and I had been married for 26 years and lived in Elmira, New York, were irrelevant in the dream. [...]

[...] You have been living in an industrialized, scientific society, so that the benefits and the great disadvantages of the rational approach appear everywhere in the social and political world. [...]

There have been numerous fascinating bits of evidence in your own lives, apart from these sessions, though certainly to some extent stimulated by the knowledge you gain in the sessions. [...]

[...] The concepts within it live. [...] I’ve begun to glimpse the greater inner dimensions from which our usual lives emerge, and to familiarize myself with other alternate methods of perception that can be used not only to see other “worlds,” but help us deal more effectively with this one.

[...] Certainly I’m trying to do that, and Seth wrote this book to help people deal more effectively with their daily lives. [...]

The funny thing is that a personality not focused in our reality can help people live in that world more effectively and joyfully by showing them that other realities also exist. [...]

In the meantime all I can say is this: We live in a world of physical facts but these spring from a deeper realm of creativity, and in a real sense facts are fictions that spring alive in our experience. [...]

My mention of the tree in the kitchen was made because I happen to enjoy seeing it when Ruburt makes his twice-weekly journeys up and down the living room floor. A tree is a living symbol to you Joseph, but I certainly do not insist that the tree be left uncovered though personally I see no reason why any other changes have to be made in the kitchen, except for the addition of the refrigerator. [...]

[...] One can look into the kitchen from one end of the living room and thus see the tree, and in a subdued light it is very effective. [...]

Your living spaces should be divided as to function. [...]

[...] It is nothing serious and I will also cover the reasons behind her particular variety of seasonal difficulties at a later time, when I go into her past lives.

The reality, the validity, the immediacy of those lives do exist simultaneously with your present life. [...] There are certain lives, as there are certain events in this life, that you may not want to face or deal with. [...]

[...] The first question: According to Seth, he, Jane and I lived in Denmark in the 1600’s. I simply wanted clarification of the data on my lifespan, as given in the notes at the end of the 541st session, in Chapter Eleven.

These lives exist simultaneously across the board, however. [...]

[...] The picture of any given life, therefore, usually comes through the experience of the personality who lived it.

[...] Sarah didn’t live there, she was just in there. She lived 3 doors away. How long did she live? [...]

[...] We sat at our dark-topped walnut table in the living room. [...]

(Sarah lived 3 doors down the street in a dark front room. [...]

[...] Those that lived were Billy and Jane.

Certainly our lives and the lives of others have been strongly influenced by the Seth material, changed for the better. [...]

[...] We live in a world slung between our dearest hopes and greatest fears, while seldom encountering either in their pure form.

[...] As if on cue, through an open front window a quickening breeze stirred the long glass wind chimes hanging just inside; their pealing harmony filled the living room. [...]

(The bathroom is in the center of our apartment; the living room is on one side of it, the bedroom and my studio on the other. In order to keep our cat, Willy, off our bed at night, we put him in the living room and close the door on that side of the bathroom. [...]

[...] Some personalities choose to be reincarnated in exteriorly oriented societies, in compensation for lives that were lived with great concentration inward, and very poor physical manipulation. [...]

(Last night, Tuesday, I went to bed while Jane was holding ESP class in the living room. [...]

[...] I didn’t realize that I was projecting at first — I didn’t have the presence of mind, say, to order myself to burst through the door into the living room. [...]

[...] literally he deprived himself of blood so that he could live on his own terms, and so that the mother and father could live in ways that they have forgotten. [...]

[...] He was of an ancient entity, and you have known him in other lives. [...]

[...] As his uncle, the father was also involved with him in two past lives in the same relationship, and as priests they were also interested in the inner workings of the universe.

...He wanted to give you an impetus, and his effect was far stronger when he died than had he lived, and he knew this... [...]

Until you learn reverence for all living things you will continue to slaughter each other. [...] Once you allow yourselves to kill you will kill any living thing. In future lives this involves the race in further adjustments.

[...] There were personalities reincarnated during the Middle Ages who had lived during the Roman experience, however they were not leading personalities and they were not able to transmit knowledge or abilities from past lives, simply because they had not the inherent strength or capability needed.

His smoking represents the tail end of a characteristic greediness that besieged him in past lives, with smoking this time as a remnant. [...]

[...] In past lives he was never temperate, neither in a physical sense, emotionally or intellectually. [...]

[...] I told my wife I’m particularly pleased that even though we live within the confines of a small city, we’re also in close contact with the natural world and its creatures. [...] I don’t want to be simplistic here, but for some years I’ve been concerned that those living in large metropolitan centers miss a certain daily, vital participation in the very environment within which by far most of the life forms on earth exist. I’m not sure what percentage of the human population now lives in urban areas, but it must be high, and climbing. Yet beliefs rule all: Evidently, even with all of the challenges that crowding can set up, it’s just as natural for people to congregate as it is for them to live spread out—perhaps even more so, if one facet of their behavior can be said to be “more natural” than another!

[...] We’d seen raccoons playing in the tree a few times, and Floyd, who lives on a farm, sees them often. [...] [I read later that females and the young live in groups, the adult males usually alone—perfectly suitable accommodations of consciousness for raccoons!] “Coons can’t run fast,” Floyd told us, “and big dogs will attack ‘em if they catch them out in the open in the daytime. [...]

[...] There is a give-and-take between the seemingly separate mental and physical aspects of your lives at every level of experience, and at every level within nature’s seeming boundaries.

[...] You live then in a personal universe, in which each being of whatever degree comes personally in contact with space and time, alive with meaning, alive as a portion of reality that no other being could or can replace.

It hints at the most precise and powerful focus, so that amid an infinity of data, events can be arranged at times so that two particular people, for example, separated in childhood, could, 30 years later, find themselves living next door to each other. [...]

[...] They hired detectives to find each other—a clear-cut motive that seemingly had little to do with their own separate personal lives, their jobs, or their families. [...]

[...] They might even have been living on the same street for a year before the meeting. [...]

[...] Quite simply, Ruburt finds carpeting sinful if it is expensive, unless it is in the living room, where he might accept it. [...]

[...] The people who have lived in the Foster Street house, and the hill house, have to some extent already conditioned the rest of the neighbors in a certain way. [...]

At this time of your lives it is important that you act. [...]

[...] In the summer there would indeed be annoying children’s voices that reminded you that others lived differently. [...]

[...] Usually they are vague grandiose dreamers, whose plans almost completely ignore the full dimensions of normal living. [...] They are the most self-righteous of the self-righteous, and they will sacrifice almost anything — their own lives or the lives of others. [...]

One evening, in this very [living] room, a small group was assembled not too long ago. [...]

[...] A lively discussion resulted, but no countering opinion could enter this man’s mind. [...]

[...] It would mean that you did not kill animals in experiments, taking their lives in order to protect the sacredness of human life. [...]

3. Following Seth’s material in these paragraphs, then, there are of course a number of other Janes and Robs busily living out their lives in a cluster of associated probable realities — and all of those Janes and Robs are just as real to Seth as we are. [...]

[...] Jane and I have now accumulated more than 60 such interrelationships, and they range all the way from color and architectural similarities among the various houses we’ve either lived in, or felt strong emotional and psychic attachments for, to human connections like the following one. [...] Moreover, this event had taken place in the apartment house we lived in on Water Street; not in our own quarters there, however, but in the apartment of another tenant whom we’ve known for a number of years.

Of my three class counterparts other than Jane, then, it developed that Norma Pryor and Jack Pierce soon embarked upon their own paths, which hardly ever cross mine even though we don’t live that far apart. [...] Sue Watkins remains close (to both of us, by the way), even though she now lives in a small community that’s well over an hour’s travel north of Elmira. [...]

[...] Some of these appear as subsidiary interests in your own lives, for example. [...]

[...] They involve the spontaneous combination of living objects and non-living into curious juxtaposition.

[...] People will (underlined) to live, to act or not to act. To a large extent they will (underlined) the events of their lives — whether or not they are willing to admit this to themselves, and they will (underlined) to die.

The will to live can be compromised by doubts, fears, and rationalizations.

Some people, for example, definitely want to live, while they try to hide from life at the same time. [...]

(4:03.) In other words, they do not trust the energy of their own lives. [...]

[...] You cannot follow their lives through from beginning to ending as you can in a book. [...] The true interchange comes as those people themselves read our books, of course, and where our ideas intersect with their lives. [...]

[...] In such a way that the imagined ones are as real in their effect upon their lives as physical events are. [...] However accomplished they might be, however, some consider themselves failures because they have not lived up to those ghost images. [...]

[...] You do know where the book begins or ends, more or less, in your creative lives, however, and you have the satisfaction of that creative activity. [...]

[...] All of this made him feel that he was not living up to expectations, that he was to some extent a failure for not doing all of those things. [...]