“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Later in these notes I also plan to include, as a partial answer to many who have written us on the subject, material Seth gave on animal consciousness; this information came through just three days ago, in the 878th session for September 10. In the meantime I want to tie together Dreams and the last Seth-Jane book, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. Seth completed his work on Mass Events about a month ago [on August 15], and a week later I began finishing my notes for it. This will require at least several months. At the same time I’ll be taking Jane’s dictation for Dreams. Along with my painting and dream recording, both of which I do in the mornings, all of these activities come together in just the kind of busy, creative life I greatly enjoy. As for Jane, she couldn’t be more pleased to be so involved with all she’s doing.

(Late last night I stepped out onto the screened-in back porch of the hill house. Our black-and-white cat, Mitzi, followed me. We’re having the house painted, and I could smell the acrylic odor. The woods on the hill in back of the house echoed with the stridulations of the cicadas and katydids. When I went outside I made sure the porch door was latched so that Mitzi couldn’t get out; she sat silhouetted against the light coming from the kitchen window as she watched me walk down the driveway. It was the natural time for her to be free, I thought. We’d had Mitzi spayed three weeks ago, when she was seven months old. [Our veterinarian has told us we have to wait until early next year before Mitzi’s littermate, Billy, can be neutered; he has some more growing to do first.] Seth’s recent material on animal consciousness has assuaged to some degree the guilt Jane and I feel at depriving the innocent cats of their reproductive roles. We’ve also felt bad over our long-standing decision to keep them in the house; they can roam no farther than the front and back porches. Both porches are screened in down to the floor and furnish the only contacts Billy and Mitzi have with the outside environment.

The feelings Jane and I have for animals almost automatically lead us to associate at least some of the implications of Seth’s statement with another one he’d given earlier in Mass Events. I remember it equally well, and find it fascinating. In Chapter 5, see the 832nd session for January 29, 1979: “Nature in all of its varieties is so richly encountered by the animals that it becomes their equivalent of your structures of culture and civilization. They respond to its rich nuances in ways impossible to describe, so that their ‘civilizations’ are built up through the interweavings of sense data that you cannot possibly perceive.”

I often consider those insights when observing both the wild and domesticated animal life, as well as the bird life, around the hill house. Much earlier in these preliminary notes I wrote that we’d had our cat Mitzi spayed almost three weeks ago [on August 27, to be exact], and that her littermate, Billy, is to be neutered early next year. I mentioned the guilt Jane and I feel because we’re depriving the cats of their reproductive roles in life, and because we don’t let them run free in the environment. I also noted that in a session on animal consciousness Jane held just three days ago, Seth had to some extent assuaged our feelings on such questions, and that his information will be of value to others. The session, the 878th, was held on September 10, 1979, and it began at 9:07 P.M. Monday—just five regular sessions after Seth had completed his work on Mass Events, and three before he began Dreams. Earlier that day I’d made a wadded-up paper ball for Mitzi to play with. Using her lightning-quick reflexes, she kept knocking it around the living room and beneath Jane’s rocker as my wife went into trance, then began to speak. Here are session excerpts:)

Observing the antics of your Mitzi gives me an excuse to begin the topic of the evening: animal consciousness.

It is somewhat fashionable to see man as … the creature who dirties his own nest, and I am not condoning much of man’s behavior in that regard. However, there are other issues, and questions seldom asked. You ignore the fact that [overall] the consciousness of animals has its own purposes and intents. It is true that animals are slaughtered under the most cruel of circumstances for human consumption—for then (underlined) they are treated simply as foodstuff.

(Pause.) Buffaloes do not roam as they did before. There are thousands of farm-bred animals, however [and have been], all throughout civilization, alive for a time, well-cared-for for a time—animals who in usual terms would not exist except for man’s “gluttonous” appetite for meat. That is the way the issue is often considered. It seldom occurs to anyone that certain forms of animal consciousness came in physical form [by choice], that certain species are prized by man and protected, or that the consciousnesses of such animals had anything at all to do with such an [overall] arrangement.

You cannot say that such animals came out ahead of the bargain, but you can say that the species of man and certain species of animals together formed an arrangement … that did have benefits for both. Man is more a part of nature than he realizes, and in the greater realm of activity he cannot take any … actions with which the rest of nature does not agree for its own reasons.

Remember here other material given about cellular communication, for example, and the vast web of intercommunication that unites all species. Of course animals can communicate with man, and of course man can communicate with other species—with all species. Such communication has always gone on. Man cannot afford to become aware of such communication at this point, simply because your entire culture is based upon the idea of the animals’ “natural” subordinate position. The men who slaughter animals cannot afford to treat those animals as possessors of living consciousnesses.

Basically [many farmers love] animals for themselves, and delight in their ways—but by itself “delighting in animals” is not considered particularly virile enough. In your society, if you like animals you must not like them for themselves, but for other reasons. If you want to be with animals then you must become a farmer, or a veterinarian, or a cattleman, or whatever….

Many animals enjoy work and purpose. They enjoy working with man. Horses enjoyed the contributions they made to man’s world. They understood their riders far more than their riders understood them. Many dogs enjoy being family protectors. There are deep emotional bonds between men and many species of animals. There is emotional response. Dolphins, for example, respond emotionally to man’s world. The animals on a farm are emotionally aware of the overall psychological content of the farmer’s life and [that of each member of] his family….

Consciousness is filled with content—any kind of consciousness. [The farmer’s] animals understand that in a certain fashion he is a midwife, responsible for some of their births. Food comes from his hands. The animals understand, on their own, that life on any terms that are physical ends with death—that the physical properties must be returned to the earth from which they came….

(Pause at 9:45.) [Animals] do not blame [human beings] for anything. If as a species you really found yourselves communicating with the animals, you would have an entirely different culture, a culture that would indeed bring about an alteration of consciousness of the most profound nature.

You have forgotten, conveniently, how much you learned from all of the animals, as I have mentioned in past sessions. You learned a good deal of medicine from watching animal behavior: You learned what plants to avoid, and which to cultivate. You learned how to rid yourself of lice by going into the water. You learned social behavior by watching the animals. At one time you could identify with animals, and they with you to a remarkable degree. They have been your teachers, though they did not choose your path. Obviously, you could not have gone your way [as a species] had it not been for the animals.

Domesticated animals have their own reasons for choosing such a state. It is, for example, usual enough to think that your cats (Billy and Mitzi) should ideally run outside in the open, because in the wild that is what cats would do.

Your cats are as alive in all ways inside of the house as out. They understand their relationship with your human reality. They enjoy contributing in your life as much as any wild animal enjoys being a part of its group. Their consciousnesses lean in a new direction, feel about the edges of concepts, sense openings of awareness of a different kind, and form alliances of consciousness quite as natural as any other.