“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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.

(Vigorously:) You could not live without viruses, nor could your biological reality as you know it now exist.

(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.”

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.

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….

“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.

And in closing: The index for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality will contain (when that book is published) a comprehensive list of references to Seth’s discussions of his units of consciousness, or CU’s, as presented in both volumes of that work.