“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Again, no one is punished for crimes committed in a past life, and in each life you are unique. The inner intelligence within you that gives you each life also gives you the conditions of each life. It certainly seems to you, or to many of you, that most people would always choose to be born healthy and whole, in an excellent environment, of parents with loving natures and genetic excellence — and in other words to grow up healthy, wealthy, and wise.

The universe is meaningful or it is not. Since the universe is indeed meaningful, then there must be a reason and a cause even for conditions that appear chaotic, cruel, or grotesque. Even in such cases, however, at some extent or another the individual can indeed start over — or at least those closest to the person in question can begin to see a larger framework of existence in which even the most dire of physical circumstances are somehow redeemed.

In many cases, it is the parents of such offspring who suffer more than their children, since it seems as if such families were unjustly saddled with the most unfortunate woes.

In these circumstances, when the personality attaches itself at conception, there is almost without exception strong past-life connections between parents and child, or there is an unceasing and almost obsessional desire to return to the earthly situation — either for a specific purpose, or because the reincarnating personality is presently obsessed with earthly existence. [...]

You may have already decided for example, now, upon the circumstances for your next incarnation. Although in your terms your new parents may be infants now, or in your scale of time not even born, the arrangements may still be made.

[...] This support is suddenly denied at birth. If the new personality has not entered earlier to any full extent, it usually does so at birth, in order to stabilize the new organism. [...] The new personality, therefore, will experience birth to varying degrees according to when it has entered this dimension.

(To me again:) Your birth (in 1919) coincided with the birth of your mother’s child in that other reality, hence her stronger feelings toward you. Your birth, and that of your youngest brother (Richard) were highly charged for her — yours for the reasons just given, and your brother’s because it represented the time of your mother’s hysterectomy in that other reality. In this reality, Richard’s birth represented your father’s final attempt to deal with emotional reality. Both of your parents imbued the third son with the strongest emotional qualities of their natures. [...]

This was a great fulfillment on his part, for the inventor did not trust himself to feel much emotion, much less give birth to emotional beings. In that other probability in which your parents originally met, your mother married a doctor, became a nurse, and helped her husband in his practice. [...]

[...] There were three offshoots: one, the nun, with mysticism conventionally expressed, but under guarded circumstances; one, the writer who veiled mystical experience through art; and one, the Ruburt you know, who experienced mystical experience directly, teaches others to do the same, and forms through writing a wedding of the two aspects. You have known two of those selves, then, and you were present at Ruburt’s birth with Idea Construction.

[...] It cannot choose to read. The plant cannot choose to walk down the street. The chicken and the plant can choose to live or die, however — rather important issues in the existence of any entity. They can choose to like or dislike their environment, and to change it according to their individual circumstances. [...] They cooperatively choose the forms that they take.

(Pause.) Your brains are not empty, but well-oiled machines ready to whirl into activity at your births. [...] In those terms, now, the brain thinks before birth. [...] Parents, however, often half-disapprove of their children if they show unusual gifts. [...]

[...] Gifted children do not fit the portrait of children that is sold to parents. [...]

[...] In each life you choose and create your own settings or environments; and in this one you chose your parents and whatever childhood incidents that came within your experience. [...]

I have also discussed reincarnation in terms of environment because many schools of thought over-emphasize the effects of reincarnational existences, so that often they explain present-life circumstances as a result of rigid and uncompromising patterns determined in a “past” life. [...]

[...] Chairs and tables, the ceilings and the floors, may seem very real and solid — quite permanent — while you by contrast may feel yourself to be highly vulnerable, caught in a moment between birth and extinction. [...]

[...] A normal child at times can slap its parent back, and the parent is obviously immune. The child’s strength is nothing against the parent's. In Ruburt’s case such normal reactions were out of the question.

[...] At some time or another almost every child wishes that his parent or parents were dead, and the parents manage to survive quite well, until they are quite ready to leave your sphere of activity.

[...] No personality chooses a life situation of illness. It chooses the best method it can to aid in overall development.

There are births that have nothing to do with physical birth, and offspring quite as real. [...] That is, the parents wish to project themselves, you see, but instead are the participators of a new personality.

[...] Reincarnated selves are no more than probable selves, choosing to experience various forms. In such circumstances, the personality does not leave your system, in your terms, for some time, though this is all subjective. [...]

The idea of being the responsible parent, for example, may lead quite easily to other psychic structures involving responsibility, so that data is accepted on its own value. You may even think that it is wrong to view any situation except through your parental status.

(“So other things were also involved — not only the birth of a book, but the emergence of the inner self, through art, into the physical universe. Now part of the focus and the strength comes from those two births, and the intensity behind them is also the reason why the book’s nativity strikes the world as strongly as it does. [...]

For example, here is a seemingly very innocent core belief: “I am a responsible parent.”

This is not the reason for all such deaths by any means, but there is usually an implied statement in them so that the death seems to have an additional meaning that makes parents and contemporaries question. Such individuals usually choose deaths with a high dramatic content, because regardless of appearances they have not been able to express the dramatic contents of their psyches in the world as it seems to be to them. [...]

[...] And when it seems that the world is devoid of meaning, then some people will make a certain kind of statement through the circumstances connected with their own deaths.

There are people who want children and mates, and have those excellent qualities that would serve them well as parents. [...]

[...] These reasons however have to do with circumstances that are usually beyond “normal” control: electromagnetic conditions, psychological circumstances—the psychological climate for example. [...]

(For a while now Jane and I have been considering the question, aloud, of Seth’s availability to us whenever we choose to hold a session. [...]

(This is a different thing than Seth being available say at 8 AM, or noon, or other capricious hours we may choose. [...]

His circumstances of birth made it difficult for him to overindulge in the rich things of life, although his present mother used rich foods as compensation for other things, and this example opened Ruburt’s eyes and actually started him on the road to self-discipline.

[...] The circumstances of birth were chosen at the last minute on his part and was made for two reasons.

[...] A personality will not choose unfavorable circumstances of rebirth until he himself sees that necessary discipline can be achieved in no other manner. [...]

[...] In a mock biological ceremony, he gives birth to the extent that he produces within his body material that was not there before. In ulcers the stomach becomes the womb — bloodied, giving birth to sores — his interpretation of a male’s “grotesque” attempt to express feminine characteristics.

(9:58.) There are biological possibilities, seldom activated in your present circumstances, that have some bearing upon the subject at hand.

[...] The time that puberty comes varies, then, and afterwards it is possible to parent a child. [...]

[...] They grow out of each other in a kind of spontaneous expansion, a profusion of creativity, while the conscious mind chooses which aspects to experience — and those aspects then become what you call an objective event.

Symbols can be called psychic codes that are interpreted in infinite fashion according to the circumstances in which consciousness finds itself. [...]

Individually and en masse, in the dream state you change the orientation of your consciousness, and deal with the birth of events which are only later time-structured or physically experienced.

[...] His parents, known to be dead, were there. [...]

[...] Yet it is also true that from its standpoint, your birth has not yet happened. [...]

[...] In such circumstances you are literally becoming aware of other perspectives of existence. [...]

[...] From this more plastic, looser experience, the child in dreams begins to choose more specific elements, and in so doing trains the senses themselves toward a more narrow sensitivity.

[...] The actualization of those events, however, requires certain practical circumstances. [...]

[...] Children’s imaginations prevent them from being too limited by their parents’ world. [...]

(2. A photograph of Jane and her parents, Marie and Delmer. [...] In that session, Seth told us that the 12 year old Jane in the photo under discussion was to become probable to the one I eventually met and married.] Beside whatever Seth could tell us about her parents, I was curious to know whether the Jane who was shown at the age of 3 might be — or was destined to become — another probable Jane.⁶)

In usual circumstances you may remember the emotions that you felt at the time a picture of yourself was taken, and to some extent those emotions may show themselves in gestures or facial expression. [...]

The picture is a relatively simple one, all in all — one in which each consciousness is assumed to be directed toward a particular focus, is ensconced in one body, with its existence bounded by birth at one end and by death at the other. [...]

The waterfall represented physical death on this level, you see, both of you dying, your brother and yourself; but he first and already adopting the birth position, for he will choose another life rather quickly. [...]

[...] During last Sunday there was a family gathering at my parents’ home in nearby Sayre, PA. There were twelve people in all: My parents, Jane and I, my brother Loren, his wife and son, and my brother Bill and his wife, and their two daughters and one son. [...]

[...] My parents also have a round mirror-topped coffee table in the living room. [...]

[...] Understand that individuals themselves between lives choose the time of their own birth, adopting ahead of time those characteristics that they feel will best aid their development, and challenge their abilities.

[...] Were the energy and emotional impetus materialized instead for example in parent-child relationships, with you as parents, in your particular cases it would be lessened in your work.

Our friend attempted to choose a different battleground last evening. [...]

[...] Yet there is no answer within quantum mechanics as to how or why one’s personal identity chooses to follow a certain probable pathway, and consciousness per se is not considered. (Some physicists, however, have implied that subatomic particles—photons—communicate with each other as they take their separate but “sympathetic” paths.) Pardon my irony here, but Seth has always dealt with the ramifications of consciousness and maintained also that we do not inhabit just one probable world, but constantly move among them by choice—and by the microsecond, if one chooses.

In our ceaseless search for answers to an unending list of personal questions, we discussed the notion that in her own way Jane has described a circle from her childhood: Her parents, Marie and Delmer, were married in Saratoga Springs, a well-known resort town in upper New York State, in 1928. [...]

[...] I think that Marie’s domineering rage at the world (chosen by her, never forget) deeply penetrated Jane’s developing psyche, and—again in those terms—caused her to set up repressive, protective inner barriers that could be activated and transformed into physical signs at any time, under certain circumstances. [...]

According to Seth, we choose our illnesses and the circumstances of our birth and death. [...] Some part of us is upset and chooses an illness or accident as a way of expressing this inner situation. [...]

[...] In each life we experience conditions that we have chosen beforehand, circumstances and challenges tailored to fit our own needs and develop our own abilities.

Why would anyone choose a life of illness or poverty? [...]