Some decades ago, I was very interested in ideas about death, afterlife, souls, etc. At that time, I had read a large number of books on this theme. Among those books, there were some books by an American writer called Jane Roberts, which had a lasting impact on me.
Recently, by chance I found some of those old Jane Roberts books that I had bought during a stay in the USA in the early 1990s. They reminded me about that period of my life when I was utterly taken up by their ideas.
This post is about the Jane Roberts' books and about its enduring learnings for my life.
Finding the Old Books
My wife said that the attic is full of useless stuff, and that I should go up and take a good look at it and decide if there is anything worth keeping, otherwise one day she will throw away everything. I know my wife, she does not make empty threats. She did throw away things from my cupboard, after telling me a couple of times to clean it.
So yesterday, I did go up to the attic. Our attic is underneath our sloping roofs, so it is difficult to reach the stuff along the walls, because the roof is so low there that I need to almost crawl to reach there. It was along one of the walls that I found a plastic bag full of old books, that some ten years ago, I had told myself that I will sort them and decide which ones to keep.
In that bag, I found some Jane Roberts' books, that brought back so many memories. One of the memory was of a cryptic motto, "Why did I Ask for This", that I had as screensaver on my old computer and which was my mantra for dealing with any challenge.
Jane Roberts' Books About Seth
Jane Roberts and her husband Robert F. Butts had written 8 books in the 1980s - Seth Speaks, The Nature of Personal Reality, Adventures in Consciousness, The Nature of the Psyche, The Seth Material, and 3 volumes of The Unknown reality.
Jane was a medium-writer, writing in a state of trance. She used to channel an "essence or a personality" called Seth, who was defined as "an intelligence no longer focused in physical reality, who has communicated with our world through writer Jane Roberts. During Roberts' trance-like states, Seth has revealed to her startling secrets about life, death, the universe beyond the five senses, and an amazing potential within us that is just waiting to be tapped."
My Ideas About Soul, Life and Afterlife
Like everyone, I had also wondered occasionally about the purpose of our lives - why do we have an conscience and what are we supposed to with the short time we have in our lives. I had lost my father when I was 21 and though I was not new to the idea of death, his sudden death had raised many questions in my mind about what happens to the soul and what, if anything, is afterlife.
When I was 16, I had once taken part in a seance at a neighbour's house. There were six of us. We had put our fingers on an upside-down empty glass on a chart on which boxes were drawn, and inside those boxes alphabet was written. We had invoked a spirit, asking it to come and help us find answers to our questions. I was very surprised when after each question, the glass had moved on the chart, pointing to a "yes" or a "no". I think that it was some kind of self-hypnotism that had made that glass move and it was not a real spirit inside that glass!
I had also tried looking at some of the religious books and their ideas about death. The biblical ideas of heaven and hell, followed by resurrection and restoration of the dead did not convince me. Similar Islamic ideas about angels of death judging my beliefs, life in the paradise and the ultimate resurrection in the eternal life, seemed equally unconvincing to me. I like some of the Hindu ideas in the Upanishads about our souls being a fragment of God and that after death, that soul reunites with the whole essence of god, but have many doubts about other beliefs such as those of individual souls that keep their individual essence and may even take rebirth.
Seth's Views About Purpose of Life
The Jane Roberts' books, touch on a wide variety of subjects such as - ways of looking at past lives, out of body experiences, astral projections, how probable realities combine to create our waking lives, how to explore our own unknown reality, and so on.
Reading these books, provoked a lot of reflections in me about souls and afterlives. Almost thirty years later, I can still recall my fascination with Seth's ideas. However, I continue to be sceptical about survival of individual souls and their afterlife. I would rather think of a Seth as an expression of the life energy as a whole.
Seth's Mantra for Me
Yet, there is one idea from these books that had a huge impact on me and in some ways continues to influence me even today. In one of the books, Seth talked about the purpose of life as the soul taking a life-form so that it could experience certain aspects of material life and that before taking birth, the soul decides what kinds of challenges it would like to face in that life. Thus, people being born with challenges like poverty, disability or lack of knowledge, are souls that need to experience those challenges in order to learn from them and also to overcome them.
For me this idea means that everything that happens to me, good or bad, happens because I chose that as a challenge for my life. So every time, I face a challenge, I must ask myself: Why did I choose this challenge for myself? What am I going to learn from it? What can I do to overcome it?
In Conclusion
I tried to share this idea with my friends but it did not always work. For example, when a close friend broke his leg in an accident, and I went to see him the hospital, I suggested that it might have been a challenge he had chosen for himself. He became very upset saying that it didn't make sense to him that he had chosen all that pain and suffering.
However, I think that it is good way to face life. Every time we face a challenge, we should ask ourselves: Why did I choose it? What can I learn from it? How can I overcome it? Giving up on a challenge and accepting defeat means that we did not give our soul a chance to learn from that experience.
For about 3 decades, I worked in international development programmes with marginalised communities in different countries of Asia, Africa and S. America. One of the approaches which I liked using in my work was called "emancipatory research", where the focus was on helping a group of persons to look at their challenges as barriers and to facilitate them to collectively think of ways to emancipate themselves from those barriers. I feel that in a way, the "emancipatory research" approach reflected the same basic idea of Seth.
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