Seth Dissects a Fatal Car Crash as an Event

Seth: The Personal Sessions, Book 4, p. 304-5 (Also known as the Deleted Sessions), 7/17/78.

In the case of your newspaper story, the same kinds of events happened several different times in various ways to all of the people involved. At unconscious levels the results were known, and the seeming accident was a planned event—a play ready to happen when all parties involved found the circumstances apt.

The father (a Mr. Moore, killed at age 47) had other difficulties. He did not want to die of a long illness. He felt trapped. He wanted to leave his wife (who is 49) and yet could not bring himself to do so. The older woman (an aunt, killed at age 77) also wanted a quick death. The wife, however, also unconsciously aware of the events, would therefore share in them.

The children were also obviously involved, and the accident would give them a new lease on life, for they had sensed an overall pervading sense of despair that lay at the family’s center stone, so to speak.

Relatively speaking, they had become spiritually listless. In their own ways they felt that perhaps life had no meaning. Brought so close to death, their youthful strength rose, and while the tragedy will haunt them, still they will wonder why they were spared—and therefore seek for the meaning of their existence.

In a way they will feel special—saved from the ‘clutches of death.’ In perhaps a manner that appears strange, they will experience a new sense of their own validity, for if they were saved from death, then SOMETHING—if only the fates—must have found them worthy. This does not mean that they will not feel guilty also at their good fortune, but it does mean that their lives will for them have a special brilliance and a contrast, in whose light they will experience all the other events of their years.

The ‘victim car’—or rather its inhabitants, and the driver of the ‘killer car’ had alike reached out into probabilities, seeking the circumstances that would in fact occur. The children were not to be killed, for example, and in some near encounters in the past, their deaths would have been involved.

The father in many ways wanted to save face, so that his death should indeed appear accidental, and the result of someone else’s fault beside his own. He did not want to live into an old age—but more than that, life had lost its flavor for him. He had sired his children, loved as well as he could, done his job—but there was no contemplative life to look forward to, no greater love than the one with his wife—and that love while conventionally sound enough, did not content him.

He [the father] was looking for someone like the young boy, someone whose actions would result in his death without malice, a death that would in its way serve an important purpose. For the ‘accident’ saved the young man’s life, and this was our father’s final gift to the world. The boy was inclined toward suicide. He would not have taken anyone with him. He wanted to die, but also in an indirect fashion, in that he could not consciously shoot himself, while he could kill himself in an event that seemed to be accidental.

The boy was filled with guilt, but a guilt that had no name, no label – a psychological guilt that was the result of his upbringing, and that perhaps involved the existence of an older brother. He felt inferior to a sometimes terrifying degree.

He had nearly killed himself before in the same fashion, and also when not drinking. The accident gives him a specific event upon which to lay his guilt, but coming so close to death, his own instincts for life were re-aroused, so that he is literally given a second chance.

Now all these motives and feelings were well-known to the participants. This does not mean that they arose often to the conventional conscious mind, yet even then there were fairly frequent-enough thoughts, for example: What will happen if I hit another car when I am driving? Or how can I get out of this predicament—on the father’s part – while still saving face? How can I die without becoming ill, which I abhor, or without having my death labeled a suicide before my children?

The conventional conscious mind pretends, and pretends well. It pretends that accidents are possible, that death is an end, and it tries to ignore all of the great threads of feeling and intent that do not fit into that picture. It is a game of hide and seek, for emotionally all of the participants in that ‘accident’ were aware of the approaching event, and at the last moment it could have been avoided.”

There is nothing in man’s nature that makes such behavior essential. A true realistic exploration of the nature of experience would automatically study that kind of emotional interrelationship, but while your society delineates the inner particles of matter, it avoids the inner psychological ‘particles’ that form the most intimate experiences of your lives.”

(Amused:) It is a good accident that you read the article. Take your break.