“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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:)

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.

Cats in the wild were, in those terms of time, exploring one kind of nature. In that kind of nature, with a natural population taken care of in the environment, there would be far fewer cats than there are now. Your cats would not exist. Why does it seem antinatural, even slightly perverse, for a household cat to, say, prefer fine cat food from a can, when it seems that he should be eating mice, perhaps, or dining upon grasshoppers? The household cat is exploring a different kind of nature, in which he has a certain relationship to human consciousness, a relationship that changes the reality of his particular kind of consciousness.

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.

Inevitably, Seth’s specific references to cats had reminded me of certain other intriguing passages of his in Mass Events. I found I’d presented them therein as excerpts from nonbook sessions in Chapter 6: See Note 2 for the 840th session. Both of the following quotations from that material contain vast implications—and should these ideas ever become well known, Jane and I feel, they’ll be sure to arouse the deep opposition of a number of vested interests.

From Session 837 for February 28, 1979: “There is no such things as a cat consciousness, basically speaking, or a bird consciousness. In those terms, there are instead simply consciousnesses that choose to take certain focuses.”

From Session 838 for March 5, 1979: “If there is no consciousness ‘tailored’ to be a cat’s or a dog’s, then there is no prepackaged, predestined, particular consciousness that is meant to be human, either….”)