“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.)

If you call the demons “negative beliefs,” however, then you have taken strides forward. People continue to die of diseases. Many of your scientific procedures, including inoculations, of themselves “cause” new diseases. It does not help a patient inoculated against smallpox and polio if [eventually] he dies of cancer as a result of his negative beliefs.⁴

Now give us a moment… One brief note: Ruburt was momentarily upset before the session — cranky. He thought he did not feel like having a session at 9:30 P.M. to try to solve the world’s problems. He just wanted to watch television and forget it all, and hidden in that crankiness is a good point: The sessions are an expression of your private and joint curiosity, a high and excellent curiosity about the nature of reality, a result of your desire to know; to know whether or not the knowledge can be held in your hands like a fruit, whether or not the knowledge can be dosed out to an ailing world as medicine.

(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.)

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.

“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.