“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The weather is still very warm for this time of year; the temperature is often above freezing in the daytime, and when we do get a dusting of snow it soon melts on the bare ground. This morning I took David Yoder home from the hospital, and this afternoon I took our tiger cat, Billy, to the veterinarian. Billy hasn’t acted well since last Saturday, and his beautiful coat has lost its luster. He had a temperature of 105° when the vet gave him a shot and prescribed some pills. Yet the doctor didn’t really know why the cat is sick. Jane and I wondered what role Billy’s illness might play in our affair with David—surely a way of thinking that would have been quite alien to us before the advent of the Seth material.

We’d also noticed that as soon as Billy lost his appetite his littermate, Mitzi, became “just a little busybody,” as Jane put it, playing and running about the house and out on the porches, as if in her own way she was trying to compensate for Billy’s unaccustomed lack of activity.

“I wouldn’t mind getting something from Seth on why Billy got sick,” I said to Jane after supper. She replied that she’d rather wait on the request: She was becoming very relaxed, and didn’t want to get involved with “deep questions” that might interfere with her increasingly comfortable state. In fact, my wife just hoped she could hold the session. She’d been “stewing” about David, the state of the world, human frailty, Billy, and herself, and had had to make strong efforts to change her thinking.

(10:10 P.M. “I thought you didn’t want Seth to say anything about Billy tonight?” I asked Jane as she easily came out of trance.

She answered the question in her own way. “That was my fault, though—that was charged material, he would have said more. Stuff about illness is still pretty charged for me.” I thought her own physical difficulties must play a strong role here, although she didn’t say so. “It makes me mad,” Jane said quietly. “At break I could feel him getting all ready to go into Billy’s condition, and I began to get all tight inside. I didn’t tell you. Then I said to myself, ‘Seth, just go into it, that’s all.’ So why didn’t he say the cat’s going to be all right?”

In reply to another of my questions, she said her emotional charge was also involved with the death of our cat, Billy One, in February 1979. Billy One had been, obviously, the predecessor to the Billy we have now; the present Billy is remarkably similar to him in looks and temperament. “I’m disgusted with myself,” Jane said. “I wish we’d called this one Willy, but I know that’s all superstitious nonsense.”

And even as the session ended, I heard Mitzi out in the kitchen, playing with the wadded-up paper ball I’d made for her. The cellar door was open. Again and again she knocked the ball down the cellar steps, raced down after it, carried it back upstairs and sent it flying down again—just as though, it seemed, she still had to perform for us while a recuperating Billy dozed on a comfortable chair in the living room.

In the 840th session for Chapter 6 of Mass Events, see my account of Billy One’s death.)