“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.

(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.

(In that same session, Seth gave these responses — among others — to my question:

(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.)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(After a long pause, Seth launched into a good bit of material that was outside of any related to his subject matter for Mass Events. He said good night at 10:26 P.M.)

During the 836th session, Seth reminded us that “animals do not ‘think’ of long lives or short lives, but of a brilliant present, which in a way, compared to your framework, has no beginning or end … time, in your terms, does not exist for them — and in the deepest of terms, a life’s quality on a human scale cannot be judged primarily in terms of its length, either.”

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….

“Years ago such spontaneous objections of mine really bothered me,” she continued, “and I’d sit and mentally argue with Seth so that the session didn’t begin right away; it only started after I mentally shut up. Rob said I’d never told him this before, when I mentioned it as we got ready for the (836th) session. It just hadn’t ever occurred to me, I guess.”

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.

And in closing: The index for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality will contain (when that book is published) a comprehensive list of references to Seth’s discussions of his units of consciousness, or CU’s, as presented in both volumes of that work.