Value Fulfillment Gives Meaning to Life
by Jim Schutte
Of all the Seth and Jane Roberts concepts, value fulfillment offers the most all-encompassing basis for the meaning behind existence. The concept of value fulfillment excites many Seth readers because it offers a positive outlook on reality and the motivations of all consciousness. It also provides us with a powerful, life-affirming perspective on how consciousness creates on a mass level toward a betterment of the individual and the whole.
Seth first mentions value fulfillment early in his co-creative venture with Jane Roberts and her husband, Robert Butts, in the early sixties. He defined it initially as “the fulfillment of literally endless values” (How to Develop Your ESP Power, chapter 10, session 54). Seth used an analogy of a forest of trees representing past, present, and future. He added that each tree expands “in terms of fulfillment of abilities and values that may be constructed upon various levels and in various guises, your present field of existence being one” (ibid.).
Seth later expands upon value fulfillment, calling it the prime motivation behind All That Is. According to Seth, every atom and particle is consciousness, and naturally seeks to improve upon itself in a constant state of becoming. That becoming is based on an excitement of spontaneity and play, transformation and durability as well as fulfilling the desire to be more than what it once was. These “fundamental laws” as Seth refers to them are “carried through in other realities” as well as our own (The “Unknown” Reality, Appendix 12, session 44.) Seth adds that value fulfillment is followed through on our physical level through physical growth, while we in our “particular horizontal plane…follow this law under the auspices of evolution” (ibid.).
Seth later elaborates on these “laws”: “You are born knowing that you possess a unique, intimate sense of being that is itself, and that seeks its own fulfillment, and the fulfillment of others. You are born seeking the actualization of the ideal. You are born seeking to add value to the quality of life, to add characteristics, energies, abilities to life that only you can individually contribute to the world, and to attain a state of being that is uniquely yours, while adding to the value fulfillment of the world (The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, chapter 9 session 862).