“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This has to do with the attack made on Ruburt by your domestic cat. Several issues are involved: Ruburt’s own mood at the time, for one thing. Now. The cat senses both of your moods immediately. It is psychically very close to you both. Being a house cat, it is closed in with you. As a rule you both radiate strong constructive energy. For a short period of time, Ruburt turned his creative energy, as he knows, I believe, inward rather than outward, knotted it up, misdirected it, did not focus it properly, and turned it into destructive energy.

Usually his aggressive feelings are automatically sublimated into his work. He grapples with ideas and with words. The destructive energy however found no outlet. It therefore took the point of least resistance, and he quite subconsciously of course projected it upon his pet. It was not that he actually focused the energy purposely upon the cat, merely that the cat’s spongelike psychic nature received it full force.

At the same time the animal was denied the usual constructive psychic atmosphere in which it usually is allowed to operate. The situation in the bedroom was not important in itself. The cat was nervous, bewildered and somewhat frightened however to begin with. The situation was simply the point at which the cat, in self-defense, threw back the destructive energy which it had received, and I must say in fury and full measure, and in the only way it knew.

Now, the other smaller episodes involving Ruburt and the cat alone have always occurred during the same process, only when lesser emotional crises were involved. You were quite right in saying that Ruburt fears violence. This is one of the keynotes of his personality, and rather obviously this has to do with his early life and his mother.

The cat therefore was allowed to chase our friend through the apartment. Beside the rather ordinary humiliation, there was the deep bewilderment, you see, for this was the first time, symbolically, that the parent could pursue physically. If it were not for these early connections Ruburt would not have been so panic-stricken.

With the particular cat episode, we have something else. The mother had an absolute terror of cats, and considered them the personification of evil. She used the cat symbol as the symbol for her own mother-in-law. She was extremely unbalanced, the mother, emotionally, and considered her husband’s mother, who was a foolishly naive, good-natured and innocent thing, as a personification of evil.

Ruburt knew this well. He has since grown to like all animals but at the moment of the attack, you see, the cat instantly became this personification of evil to him, and again his primary concern was to flee. There was never an instant in the whole affair when he thought of striking back.

Ruburt denied the cat its usual psychic reinforcement also, you see. Incidentally, working with the earth will almost always restore him.