“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.

(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.)

(9:38.) Give us a moment… The viruses in the body have a social, cooperative existence. Their effects become deadly only under certain conditions. The viruses must be triggered into destructive activity, and this happens only at a certain point, when the individual involved is actively seeking either death or a crisis situation biologically.

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.

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’d felt the same way when Willy had died three years ago, and now — as she had then — Jane said sadly: “If I could answer our questions about that cat’s death, maybe I could answer our questions about everything….”

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.’

“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.

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.