“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A cat playfully killing a mouse and eating it is not evil. It suffers no guilt. On biological levels both animals understand. The consciousness of the mouse, under the innate knowledge of impending pain, leaves its body. The cat uses the warm flesh. The mouse itself has been hunter as well as prey, and both understand the terms in ways that are very difficult to explain.

(As Seth-Jane delivered this material, my mind flashed back many years to a summer day when I was about eleven years old. With my two brothers I sat in the back yard of the house in which we grew up, in a small town not far from Elmira. Our next-door neighbor’s cat, Mitzi, had caught a field mouse. She played with it in the grass; with conflicting feelings I watched Mitzi, of whom I was very fond, block off each attempt of the terrified mouse to escape — until finally, having had her sport, she ate it….

The cat eats the mouse.

At certain levels both cat and mouse understand the nature of the life energy they share, and are not — in those terms — jealous for their own individuality. This does not mean they will not struggle to live, but that they have a built-in unconscious sense of unity with nature in which they know they will not be lost or immersed (quietly intent).

A cat knows how to kill a mouse, and the consciousness of the mouse knows when to leave. [...] They are not triggered as easily under conditions alien to the mouse’s understanding of its and the hunter’s biological natures.

Your dream was an excellent rendition, for here you have men unaware of the mouse’s dilemma to such an extent that it was beside the point—so taken for granted that it became invisible. [...] But the means were not those that would benefit all involved, for the mouse died no quick death.

[...] You do not appreciate your own dream, or your appreciation of it is too remote—and yes, it does contain some reincarnational data, for it shows you a moment in a life when a decision was made, even though the emotional disgust that you felt at the time was separated from you—for the mouse at the time stood not only for itself but also for the victims of war, burned bodies you had seen while soldiers went about the remains to see what loot might be left.

[...] Obviously, I am saying that “deadly” viruses do not “think of themselves” as killers, any more than a cat does when it devours a mouse. The mouse may die, and a cell might die as a result of the virus, but the connotations applied to such events are also the results of beliefs. [...]

[...] I fed the cats and put them in the cellar. [Billy had caught a mouse in my writing room this afternoon.] “I’m just waiting,” Jane said, half-dozing. [...]

[...] He could not bear to see a cat play with a mouse, without blaming God who would permit such cruelty. [...]

A cat playfully killing a mouse and eating it is not evil. [...] The consciousness of the mouse, under the innate knowledge of impending pain, leaves its body. The cat uses the warm flesh. The mouse itself has been hunter as well as prey, and both understand the terms in ways that are very difficult to explain.

At certain levels both cat and mouse understand the nature of the life-energy they share, and are not — in those terms — jealous for their own individuality … Man, pursuing his own way, chose to step outside of that framework — on a conscious level….

[...] Equally insistent are the puzzles posed by the missing intermediate forms in the fossil record: Where are all the remnants of those creatures that linked birds, reptiles, cats, monkeys, and human beings? [...]