“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I pushed Jane in her chair out on the porch, as close to the hemlock as we could get behind the floor-to-ceiling glass; we looked up at the chattering animal from only three feet away. We’d seen raccoons playing in the tree a few times, and Floyd, who lives on a farm, sees them often. This one was fully grown and bore a heavy coat of mixed black, brown, and gray hair; the colors exactly matched those of the tree trunk. In the gloomy day we couldn’t see eyes in the black face. We couldn’t tell the animal’s sex. [I read later that females and the young live in groups, the adult males usually alone—perfectly suitable accommodations of consciousness for raccoons!] “Coons can’t run fast,” Floyd told us, “and big dogs will attack ‘em if they catch them out in the open in the daytime. But that coon could kill even a big dog, if it got cornered.” He added that if we heard a loud thudding noise on the roof tonight, it meant that an animal had managed to dislodge the stone cap on the chimney. And Floyd had been right: The raccoon stayed in the tree until dusk, then descended and ambled into the woods in back of the house.³

Jane’s delivery for Seth was hardly fast this evening, but still she paced the session quite a bit more rapidly than she had the one for last Tuesday night. And we heard no sounds at all from the fireplace in back of me, or from the roof.)

(9:00.) As Ruburt himself often mentioned in his own book, The God of Jane, you should never accept as fact a theory that contradicts (underlined) your own experience. Man’s experience (underlined) includes, for example, all kinds of behavior for which science has no answers. That is well and good. Science cannot be blamed for saying that its methods are not conducive to the study of this or that area of experience—but science should at least be rapped on the knuckles smartly if it automatically rejects such behavior as valid, legitimate or real, or when it attempts to place such events outside of the realm of actuality. Science can justly be reprimanded when it tries to pretend that man’s experience (underlined) is limited to those events that science can explain.

It is instead, of course, quite possible that your predictable world exists not in spite of but because of those surprising, unpredictable, unofficial occurrences. Period. There is a kind of larger spontaneous order of which the seemingly unpredictable elements of your world provide their own clues.

3. Jane and I regret that we’ve deprived our guest of the protected and warm—if not natural—habitat it had chosen. We had certainly enjoyed watching the raccoon. I told my wife I’m particularly pleased that even though we live within the confines of a small city, we’re also in close contact with the natural world and its creatures. I think of this enjoyable proximity as an excellent way of keeping in perspective our human position upon the planet. I don’t want to be simplistic here, but for some years I’ve been concerned that those living in large metropolitan centers miss a certain daily, vital participation in the very environment within which by far most of the life forms on earth exist. I’m not sure what percentage of the human population now lives in urban areas, but it must be high, and climbing. Yet beliefs rule all: Evidently, even with all of the challenges that crowding can set up, it’s just as natural for people to congregate as it is for them to live spread out—perhaps even more so, if one facet of their behavior can be said to be “more natural” than another!