Concordia, Seth, Death

Pic from space of Concordia sinking

+++

On Friday, January 13, 2012, the $450 million cruise ship Costa Concordia crashed into a reef off the island of Giglio, Italy, with more than 4,200 passengers and crew on board. You can read the full story of this horrendous tragedy here.

Read the full AP story for the details. Right now, as of January 18, there are 11 dead, and 21 missing. Those numbers seem quite small in light of the  more than 4,000 passengers.

Musing Egret, a planetary empath  whose stories we have used in our synchro books, asked if we could write a post on this tragedy as it relates to the Seth material. Her request:

“Could y’all write an entry about the ship wreck off the western Italian coast and the lives lost? I’m really curious about Sethian ideas of we choose our own deaths and yet, the responsibility of others we entrust our well-being to. I’ve been in a wrestling match with these ideas since 1978. Given than any one of us will die at any given time….what do you think determines whether it’s natural disaster (tsunami, hurricane, tornado, flood, earthquake, volcano) or human-made? (Bombings, disease, murder, shipwrecks, airplane wrecks, car wrecks, or any other freak accident brought on by human cause) Your thoughts?”

Well, with a mass event and Seth, it’s impossible to resist the exploration.  I read my first Seth book in 1973, when my former graduate school roommate was visiting one weekend and asked if I’d read or heard of Seth Speaks.  I hadn’t.  The moment she said the material was channeled, my prejudices reared up.  All of the channeled books I had read to that point seemed silly and poorly written.  But a few days later, I found myself at the local bookstore and I bought a copy of Seth Speaks.  As soon as I started reading, my prejudices vanished. Not only was the material well-written, but it explained complex concepts in a comprehensible way. I devoured the book in two sittings.

Seth’s basic tenets are relatively simple: You get what you concentrate on  and you create your life from the inside out, based on your beliefs, thoughts, and desires. Seth says we choose every aspect of our existence- our parents, the circumstances into which we’re born, our talents, skills, siblings, even the way we die. In other words, total free will.

From Seth Speaks, chapter 9, The Death Experience: “There is no separate, indivisible, specific point of death. Life is a state of becoming, and death is a part of this process of becoming.”  In Seth’s system, portions of our bodies die throughout our lifetimes. “Your body is completely different now…than it was ten years ago. The body you had ten years ago, my dear readers, is dead. Yet obviously you do not feel that you are dead… The process, you see, continues so smoothly that you are not aware of it. “

He continues talking about how our beliefs about the afterlife influence what we experience when we die. If we believe in hell, we experience hell. “A belief in a stereotype heaven can result in a hallucination of heavenly conditions. You always form your own reality according to your ideas and expectations. This is the nature of consciousness in whatever reality it finds itself. Such hallucinations….are temporary.”

In the afterlife, says Seth, telepathy operates without distortion. “Your true feelings toward relatives who are also dead will be known to you and them.”

I could go on at great length here, explaining Seth’s take on things. But the core of it seems to be that death and the afterlife aren’t at all like what traditional religions teach. In terms of how you die, though, Seth has some interesting things to say that seem to pertain to Musing Egret’s questions and the cruise ship disaster.

The questions apply to any disaster, really, from natural to man made, from the Indonesian tsunami to 9-11 to the Chilean earthquake to the Fukushima debacle. Some people choose to go out in a big way that makes a statement of some sort – mass event deaths like this cruise ship wreck or 9-11 or in the Indonesia tsunami, which killed nearly a quarter of million individuals. Perhaps their souls need to remember and the drama facilitates that. Others choose to leave quietly, with a minimum of drama,  and that, too, is in line with their desires and beliefs.

Some months back, I read a moving post on DJan’s blog –  about a young woman who had died doing what she loved – skydiving.  Loss if something DJan knows about – she lost both of her kids – but it doesn’t define her. And on Nancy Atkinson’s blog, there’s a heartfelt story about the death of her niece.

Just as moving are stories from parents about the children they have lost. Debra Page –    and her husband lost a two-year-old daughter.   Why? Why their young girl? Mike Perry of the U.K. has mentioned the loss of his daughter in some of his posts. Brian Weiss, psychiatrist, past life researcher , and author of Many Lives, Many Masters, lost an infant daughter and writes about it in that book.  In each instance of such tragedies – and the loss of a child is beyond my comprehension, how you rebound from this, integrate it into any coherent worldview that you can live with – the big question remains: why? –

According to Seth, it’s all part of what we choose when we are between lives. “…the planning itself is all a part of experience and development. The in-between existence, therefore, is every bit as important as the period that is chosen (for the next life).”

Weiss came to believe that his daughter died early to pay off  his karmic debt. I don’t recall him ever explaining what that debt was. Author and past-life researcher Carol Bowman explains these concepts beautifully in her two books on children’s past lives. And Musing Egret herself, if memory serves, lost a child.

In response to Musing Egret’s questions about death, Seth and the Italian cruise ship, I think it boils down to this: the way we choose to die is as individualized and varied as we humans are. No one can second guess what your soul needs and desires through life, through death, and beyond.

But as  Gertrude Stein said, The way you die is as important as the way you live.”

You choose. The reasons you choose are known only to you.