“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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

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.

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.