“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The race suffers when any of its members die of starvation or disease, even as a whole plant suffers if a group of its leaves are “unhappy.” [...]

[...] 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....” [...]

(Now that idea, I thought as I went into the kitchen to get Jane some wine for the session, made sense—it could account for the perpetuation of her symptoms on a daily, present-life basis, and made a lot more sense than thinking she was suffering now because of something that happened to her when she was perhaps eight years old or whatever. [...]

These involved large vital issues regarding the nature of suffering. [...]

[...] It will also be recalled that in several different sessions Bill was counseled by Seth to live alone, lest he suffer a recurrence of his lung trouble.)

(All very intently:) That environment, in your terms, certainly includes suffering. If joy has always been one of the characteristics of earth experience, so has suffering, and the subject will be covered in this book. [...]

[...] Your own parental problem has again suffered an explosion of sorts, and so far you have handled it well.

[...] If you had to stay, and if you will not be given as much money as you think you should receive, then you will see to it that the work will suffer. [...]

(10:32.) Your young man, your visitor, does indeed suffer torments because he is so thoroughly convinced he is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and all of his unfortunate experiences follow that conviction, which so far he has refused to give up. [...]

[...] Jane went to see Miss Callahan, who had difficulty answering the door, was suffering from lapses of memory, and was indeed in poor condition. [...]

[...] For if he suffered because of them, he knew that you would also suffer, until finally you would have to admit the truths that could set you both free.

[...] She had been injured and suffered a relapse when she fell and twisted or pulled on some of the staples in her leg. [...]

[...] Animals in fact suffer greatly, for they often become so terrified of modern methods of medicine that an inoculation against one disease promptly brings about the occurrence of another.

[...] At the time you did suffer a state of shock initially, but the body could handle that. [...]

Illness and suffering are not thrust upon you by God, or by All That Is, or by an outside agency. They are a by-product of the learning process, created by you, in themselves quite neutral … Illness and suffering are the results of the misdirection of creative energy. [...] Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you how to stop suffering. [...]

(Ironically, Charles Darwin’s natural selection, “the survival of the fittest,” [a phrase that Darwin himself did not originate, by the way], allows for all sorts of pain and suffering in the process — the same unhappy facts of life, in Darwin’s view, that finally turned him into an agnostic, away from a God who could allow such things to exist! [...] Instead, he assigned the pain and suffering in the world to the impersonal workings of natural selection and chance variation [or genetic mutation]. [...]

[...] It suffers no guilt. [...]

[...] The sacredness of life cannot be sacrificed for life’s convenience, or the quality of life itself will suffer. In the same manner, say, the ideal is to protect human life, and in the pursuit of that ideal you give generations of various animals deadly diseases, and sacrifice their lives.³ Your justification may be that people have souls and animals do not, or that the quality of life is less in the animals, but regardless of those arguments this is fanaticism — and the quality of human life itself suffers as a result, for those who sacrifice any kind of life along the way lose some respect for all life, human life included. [...]

(After a few minutes, Jane said the dream could have been related to the injuries the nurse’s aide had suffered to her own impaired leg — the one that had been stapled inside that I described in a recent session. [...]

A species that senses a lack of this quality can in one way or another destroy its offspring — not because they could not survive otherwise, but because the quality of that survival would bring about vast suffering, for example, so distorting the nature of life as to almost make a mockery of it. [...]

(9:55.) Following such a belief, you will confuse suffering with saintliness, desolation with purity, and the denial of the body as spirituality and a badge of holiness. [...]

[...] Your sexual lives, despite what you may jointly think, did not suffer on the level in which both of you were working at one time. [...]

(On February 17, 1964 our neighbor Miss Florence Callahan who lived in the front apartment on the same floor as Jane and I, was taken to the hospital suffering from arteriosclerosis. [...]

One of the children is suffering to some extent psychologically because of the dilemma, and you are too much the autocrat with this child, a female.

[...] Sudden illnesses are thought of as frightening and unpredictable, with the sufferer a victim, perhaps, of a virus. [...]

[...] There was movement of the middle class from the city proper into the suburbs, with a change in the tax balance, and the city merchants began to suffer. [...]