“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Almost five weeks have passed since Seth gave the 835th session. He’s come through with four more sessions since then, too — the last three of them growing out of the unexpected death of our young cat, Billy, on February 28. Let me try to put that unhappy event in perspective now, in the continuing chronology of our lives as they’re enmeshed in the Seth material in general and in Mass Events in particular.

(When I arose early on the 26th so that I could wrap the proofs for mailing, however, I noticed that Billy didn’t appear to feel well. Jane watched him while I went to the post office. He was no better when I returned, and as the morning passed we came to realize that he had a urinary problem. That afternoon I took him to the veterinarian, who kept him for treatment; the problem was serious; by then the cat was in great pain. Jane and I both wondered: Why Billy? Why should such a seemingly perfect young creature suddenly become that sick, for no observable reason? “We were shocked,¹ no doubt about it,” I wrote in my notes for the 836th session, a private or nonbook one which Jane gave that evening. During the session Seth discussed Billy’s illness to some extent, while also giving the first “installment” of an answer to a longstanding question of mine: I was curious about the relationship between the host — whether human, animal, or plant — and a disease it might contract, one that was “caused,” say, by a virus. I’ll return to the question at the end of these notes.

(On Tuesday the veterinarian told us by telephone that Billy was better, that “probably” we could take him home the following afternoon; I was to call before making the drive across town, though. Wednesday afternoon, then, an hour before I was due to check, the phone rang. The thought of our vet flashed into my mind, naturally enough. And it was he, regretfully explaining that Billy had died an hour or so before. The doctor had left the office to make a call. When he returned he found Billy dead in his cage. He didn’t know why the cat had died…. We felt badly indeed — yet that night Jane insisted upon holding the 837th session.²

(The events of our lives kept on unfolding. On the next day, March 1, the page proofs for Seth’s Psyche arrived from the publisher, but we could see that going over that much shorter book would be easy compared to our protracted labors for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. The day after that, a dear friend brought us two six-week-old kittens, littermates fresh from a nearby farm. At once Jane and I named them Billy Two and Mitzi: Billy Two, obviously, because he was also a tiger cat and bore a strong resemblance to the dead Billy; Mitzi because with her longer, black and white fur she at once reminded me of the Mitzi who’d belonged to the Butts’s next-door neighbors when I was a child. The two cats had lived only in a gloomy barn so far, and were so shy they hid under our living-room couch for several days.

(Seth also touched upon the question while dealing mainly with Billy’s death in the next three sessions, which are also private, but this evening he was more specific. Even though he didn’t call this 840th session book dictation, we’re presenting part of it here because the material fits in so well with his themes for Mass Events.)

1. We were shocked because Billy’s unexpected — and serious — illness reminded us of the almost universally accepted view that life is terribly vulnerable. Any kind of life. Billy was a replacement for our previous cat, Willy (who’d died in November 1976 at the age of 16), and we’d found him at an animal shelter the next weekend after Willy’s death; as far as having a pet to love went, we’d thought ourselves “set” for a number of years. At first we’d called the newcomer Willy Two, but soon automatically shortened that to Billy.

I might add here another insight into the relationship between Jane and Seth — the kind of information we continue to search for. Before holding the 836th session, Jane had found herself mourning the possibility that Billy might die. From Seth she then picked up material to the effect that “time was in the present to the cat … in a way its life was eternal to it, whether it lived 10 months or 10 years, or whatever.” At the time (she wrote later for me) emotionally she objected strenuously to that message of Seth’s, since “it seemed too easy a way to sign off a cat’s life — or any other life — even if it was true. And I did accept that it was true, or as close to the truth as we could get….

2. In the 837th session Seth dealt mostly with Billy’s death. It wasn’t that the loss of “just a cat” was the only thing involved in our deep upsets (although Billy’s death came first in our reactions); we also felt a host of emotional and intellectual ramifications arising from that event. We still couldn’t believe Billy was gone for good. This effect was heightened because we had no body to “prove” his death to us. I hadn’t gone after him: The ground was frozen so I couldn’t bury him in the back yard beside Willy, and the veterinarian had agreed to dispose of the remains for us.

We’re still trying to get answers, with the help of the Seth material. I don’t mind noting that I think that with Seth, Jane has achieved some understanding of our species’ larger questions about life and death. Seth went into those questions while talking about Billy in sessions 837–39, but his material is much too long to print in Mass Events — and even too long to touch upon the highlights in any adequate way. There follow a few quotations from the material he gave us in those private sessions, however. We hope they’ll indicate some of the directions his answers took, about those intimate challenges that concern us all.

From Session 837 for February 28, held on the evening of the day Billy died: “My dear friends: Existence is larger than life or death. Life and death are both states of existence. An identity exists whether it is in the state of life or in the state of death. Your cat’s consciousness never was dependent upon its physical form. Instead, the consciousness was itself choosing the experience of cathood. There was nothing that said: ‘This consciousness must be a cat.’

“Billy belonged in another probability, and in a fashion you switched probabilities for him, though without his consent, when you took him from the animal shelter, where he would have soon been ‘done away with.’ His three years with you represented a grace period for him…. He did not make this probability his own because of what you may call ‘other commitments’ — or rather, other purposes.

“You both knew Billy was about to die. So did the plants in your house, and the trees outside your door. The cellular announcement was made that the strong possibility existed, for the birth and death of each cell is known to all cells in the world….” (For material on cellular communication, see Session 804 after 10:45.)

“Cellular communication is too fast for you to follow. The cat could have changed its mind, of course, but the signals were sent out, and ahead of time. [Several people who wrote to you] picked up on that probability….” With some amazement Jane and I had noticed this in letters we received — from both friends and strangers — during the days immediately following Billy’s death.

From Session 839 for March 7: “The quality of identity is far more mysterious than you understand, for you assign an identity in a blanket fashion, say, to each living thing. Now your dead cat, Billy, exists in the following manner:

“That identity of Billy’s remains vital, known to itself whether or not it is reactivated in your terms. This is not necessarily always the case — and there is great variation — but Billy identified with ‘the larger organization’ of the litter [that is, with his brothers and sisters, all of whom are also dead], and the consciousnesses of that litter are now together. They are forming a gestalt, where the five consciousnesses will merge to form a new identity.”

On separate days, both Jane and I had vivid psychic experiences involving our perceptions of Billy not long after his death: Each in our own way, we saw him “larger than life,” performing with amazing vitality and grace. In my own case, the experience was so vivid as to be almost frightening. Jane hopes to use both events, plus some material she wrote on scientific experimentation with animals, in one of her own books.