“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.)

(9:55.) Give us a moment… What I have said about viruses applies to all biological life. Viruses are “highly intelligent” — meaning that they react quickly to stimuli. They are responsive to emotional states. They are social. Their scale of life varies considerably, and some can be inactive for centuries, and revive. They have extensive memory patterns, biologically imprinted. Some can multiply in the tens of thousands within seconds. They are in many ways the basis of biological life, but you are aware of them only when they show “a deadly face.”

I surely understand that you want to make the knowledge practical in the physical world, and to help people as much as you can, but that cannot be the only goal — for that goal must always be the high personal exploration of consciousness, the creative and artistic pursuit for which there may be no name. You do not make shoes to put on people’s feet. You do not make deodorants to stop perspiration. If you did either of these things, you could see material results — material results — at once: people with shoes of your making, and people who did not sweat (with some humor). (In parentheses: Such deodorants are highly disadvantageous, incidentally.)

You are not dealing with material specifics, or even with the psychic specifics. You are dealing instead with the initiation of a framework of beliefs far better than those now current — a framework that is large enough to contain all specifics, through which people can indeed learn to understand themselves better. You are providing an overall aura of spiritual and intellectual light which would help people precisely because you are not tied to specifics, but engaged with the larger levels of reality from which the specifics emerge….

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.

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.”

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.

“There is no such thing as a cat consciousness, basically speaking, or a bird consciousness. In those terms, there are instead simply consciousnesses that choose to take certain focuses. We have not touched upon some of these matters, and some are, again, most difficult to explain, as we wish to avoid distortions. These would have nothing to do with Ruburt per se, but simply the way you put concepts together at this stage of development.”

“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.

“The units of consciousness that organized to form his identity as you knew it, still form that pattern — but not physically. The cat exists as itself in the greater living memory of its own ‘larger’ selfhood. Its organization — the cat’s — exists inviolately, but as a part of the greater psychic organization from which it came.

“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.”