“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.

(First, on February 12, five days after the 835th session was held, Jane and I received from Prentice-Hall the page proofs for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. Checking those 499 pages, word for word against our carbon copy of the original manuscript, called for the most demanding concentration on our parts for the next 13 days.

(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.

(“What,” I wrote for the 836th session, “is the real relationship between the host organism and disease?” Recently Jane and I talked about the evident worldwide eradication of smallpox, as announced earlier this month by WHO — the World Health Organization — and wondered if the disease has truly been eliminated. [WHO won’t officially declare smallpox done away with for a year or so, while waiting to see if any new cases surface.] Or would smallpox appear again, say 10 years from now? Obviously, I said to Jane more than once, if as an entity smallpox could “think” as we do, it would hardly consider itself bad, or such an awful disease or scourge. If it was so terrible, why did it ever exist within nature’s framework to begin with? What was its role in the whole panoply of life forms? Could the “disease” ever move from whatever probability it now occupies back into our own reality some day, thus appearing to have regenerated itself? What would we humans say if that happened? Smallpox’s reappearance would undoubtedly be rationalized: It had lain hidden or dormant in some uninvestigated pocket of humanity; or it was a mutation, somehow “evolving” into smallpox from one of the closely related animal poxes.

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.

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.