“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The cat was male, called originally Katherine however, and identified as female. He got in scrapes as Ruburt’s father did in bars. The cat knew of the identifications. He was willing however to trade these for several years of additional physical life, in which he also learned for the first time to relate to gentleness; even to be on terms with another cat, and Willy in his way served as a mentor.

Ruburt identified with him being closed up and running scared. He was afraid of the cat, considering him wild and caged originally, as his mother had been in his interpretation, so he felt forced to help the cat (who did not have any love for him), as he felt before he had to help his mother—who would kill him if she had the chance.

Ruburt’s mother hated cats, particularly black ones. He, Rooney, and Ruburt passed symptoms back and forth. He was not a passive receptor however, the cat, and he even learned from his encounters with Jack Wall. Many of Ruburt’s feelings about his mother however are buried in Rooney’s grave. (Very important.) Rooney however is free of a distrust that he had carried with him, having to do with his background in that house, this time, across the way, and was grateful for those additional years you gave him.

[...] 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.

[...] From Seth she then picked up material to the effect that “time was in the present to the cat … in a way its life was eternal to it, whether it lived 10 months or 10 years, or whatever.” At the time (she wrote later for me) emotionally she objected strenuously to that message of Seth’s, since “it seemed too easy a way to sign off a cat’s life — or any other life — even if it was true. [...]

[...] Your cat’s consciousness never was dependent upon its physical form. [...] There was nothing that said: ‘This consciousness must be a cat.’

[...] The cats did not represent your physical cats (Mitzi and Billy Two), but old comfortable beliefs about the nature of the spontaneous self connected with ideas he picked up from his mother, in which cats represented the worst aspects of human behavior and impulses: they fawned upon you, yet were evil, and could turn against you in a moment.

[...] She said that Seth didn’t mention one part of the dream: that after it she became aware of herself saying “You’ll have to say goodbye to your cats.” She took this to mean she was thinking of dying, and she didn’t want to do this, or leave the cats. [...]

(Seth returned once more at 11:54, this time again in answer to our speculations concerning the second cat and Jane’s sleepwalking episode. Here is the rest of the story involving the second cat: After I left for work and Jane had taken the cat into the house, she discovered to her sorrow that the cat had somehow gotten its lower jaw caught in a new collar we had put on it the day before, and that evidently the cat’s lower jaw had been forced open in this strained position for some hours. [...] The cat promptly fell into a stuporous sleep, that lasted all day.

(Recently we acquired a second cat, a stray. [...] Jane fed the cat and locked our apartment door as usual before returning to bed. I know she was up at this time because she woke me getting back into bed, and told me the second cat had come home. I also heard this cat and our first cat, Willy, playing in the living room.

(When we got up this morning cat number two was nowhere to be found. [...] After I left, she found cat number two in the yard. Question: How did the cat get there? [...]

[...] A psychic coordination, a sensitive apathy, received by the bug as to the nature of the cat, creates about the bug’s construction of the cat b-a-n-d-s in infrared, solid to both the cat and the bug. The bug then sees a gigantic but blurred, incomplete so to speak, cat image, which is surrounded by infrared solidity, which is significant to the bug in terms quite incomprehensible to you.

Your cat is also different, a completely different construction, for each of you. It is easier, perhaps, to understand if we first consider the difference between the bug’s construction of the cat, and the cat’s construction of the bug, before we go on.

We will take your cat and his bug. Your cat created the bug that he saw. [...]

This has to do with the attack made on Ruburt by your domestic cat. [...] The cat senses both of your moods immediately. [...] Being a house cat, it is closed in with you. [...]

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. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] This morning I took David Yoder home from the hospital, and this afternoon I took our tiger cat, Billy, to the veterinarian. [...] Yet the doctor didn’t really know why the cat is sick. [...]

“To the cat this is an experience. [...] Your other cat, for example, reacted in an opposite fashion, actively providing herself with additional stimuli.

(10:05.) “Your cat, in a strange fashion, reacted to the weather—not reacted so much as identified with its interpretation of the weather’s mood—became part of the weather in a fashion, opened up to it, but became depressed in your terms.

[...] As can be noted on the tracing, Marilyn’s ceramic cat is composed of round or circular components. The cat’s head rises especially high in the modern fashion.

[...] The M can refer to Marilyn, who made the ceramic cat. [...] However, she thought it might refer to the fact that the ceramic cat has a certain type of high-gloss glaze fired on; this glaze being made of glass.

[...] Thus the G for glass glaze refers to the cat shown on the object, the M to Marilyn who made the cat. [...]

The cat awakened your love. [...] The consciousness of the cat grew and developed. [...] Now though it seems to you perhaps at this point tragic, the facts are that the real tragedy would have occurred had the cat lived, in your terms, and had you curled up in it, in your house on the corner, and turned your love inward to the animal rather than outward, for there are people who need it. [...]

[...] The cat taught you to love again and to open up again. You were also close to hiding within your home with the cat and ignoring physical reality. [...]

(Rachel had been discussing the death of her cat and how upset she had been feeling.)

Willy was always the house cat, you see, and Jane stayed in the house all day, writing. So it is the house cat who changes habits, rather than Rooney (our other cat).

[...] In a way these were not directed at the cat, yet Ruburt also knew the cat would pick them up.

[...] Now he has sent Willy out as a testing device, and the cat does not know exactly what has happened.

Ruburt’s mother was very much afraid of cats, particularly black ones. [...] The cat was not a passive receptor, however, and also learned from his encounters with your neighbor downstairs (who also has a cat). Many of Ruburt’s feelings about his mother are buried in Rooney’s grave. [...]

The cat was a male. [...] The cat knew of the identification but was willing to trade this for several years of additional physical life, in which he also learned to relate to gentleness for the first time.

Rooney even learned to be on terms with another cat; Willy, your older cat, in his way served as mentor.

Pretend that you not only understood your cat’s concept of time to some degree, but could also experience his sense of time through the cat itself. In doing this you would in no way bother, inhibit or annoy the cat. [...]

It is true that man is physically an animal and that a cat is an animal. [...] You cannot of course experience the cat’s sense of time, but you can come closer to understanding his sense of time than he could ever come in understanding yours.

(I had mentioned asking Seth about Einstein’s theories during last break, and we had also mentioned our cat, Willy.)

[...] The cats obviously felt no remorse at all—nor should they. [...] I kept a box of cat goodies out there to give black dog [as I call her, not knowing her name] a snack in the early morning. One of the cats had caught the chipmunk on the porch. [...]

(“I also wanted to ask about the cats and the chipmunk,” I said.

(Once again one of our cats scratched at the door for admittance. As she has done before Jane got up while speaking, and without interrupting her delivery let the cat in. [...]

[...] The cat episode, my dear friend, (laugh) was not connected with either of your indispositions, except for your own negative expectations. [...] You learned quickly, saving your cat.

[...] She wasn’t aware, really, that she had let the cat in until she was back in the chair. [...]

[...] When I speak of responsibility, I speak of the cat’s responsibility to lift its tail or twirl its ear. No cat says “I must hold my backside in such and such a fashion or I must play with catnip.” And yet a cat is a cat, a perfect cat, whether it is flawed or has a broken foot, or whether it can hear or not hear, or whether it is ancient or young. A cat is a perfect cat. [...] But in the same way you have a responsibility to be yourselves as a cat has to be itself. [...]

[...] Not very elaborate: I’d dreamed that I’d been visiting some friends, a married couple, I believe, and that they had a number of cats of their own in the place. [...] Each time I picked up a cat, I discovered that I didn’t have Billy. All of the cats were marked more or less similarly, yet there were enough differences in color and pattern so that I could know Billy when and if I found him.)

Cats in the wild were, in those terms of time, exploring one kind of nature. In that kind of nature, with a natural population taken care of in the environment, there would be far fewer cats than there are now. Your cats would not exist. Why does it seem antinatural, even slightly perverse, for a household cat to, say, prefer fine cat food from a can, when it seems that he should be eating mice, perhaps, or dining upon grasshoppers? The household cat is exploring a different kind of nature, in which he has a certain relationship to human consciousness, a relationship that changes the reality of his particular kind of consciousness.

[...] Our black-and-white cat, Mitzi, followed me. [...] [Our veterinarian has told us we have to wait until early next year before Mitzi’s littermate, Billy, can be neutered; he has some more growing to do first.] Seth’s recent material on animal consciousness has assuaged to some degree the guilt Jane and I feel at depriving the innocent cats of their reproductive roles. [...]

[...] Much earlier in these preliminary notes I wrote that we’d had our cat Mitzi spayed almost three weeks ago [on August 27, to be exact], and that her littermate, Billy, is to be neutered early next year. I mentioned the guilt Jane and I feel because we’re depriving the cats of their reproductive roles in life, and because we don’t let them run free in the environment. [...]

(An amusing exchange now developed between Seth and Peg concerning cats. As if to help matters out, our cat got up from his perch on the TV set and jumped down. [...]

[...] It will be remembered that Seth refers to Bill Gallagher as the Jesuit, and to Peg as the cat lover. [...]

The cat lover should look out for someone... [...]

(3rd Question: “What’s that about a black cat?” “A distant connection. [...] the black cat on page 328. Seth’s additional data here conjures up the thought that the neighbor’s black cat also serves as the classic symbol of bad or poor luck; the connection here being the failing health of my father, and the failing health in a more drastic way of Mr. Meeker, the father-in-law of my brother Loren. [...]

(One of our cats now scratched at the hall door for admittance, as is customary. Without pausing, her eyes open and dark, Jane rose and went to the door and let the cat in. [...]

(“Distant connection with a cat. [...] A black cat is connected to my mother in perhaps more than a casual way. [...]

[...] Mitzi, our cat, has been loaded with fleas. Rob tried to get a collar on her a month ago and there was such a hassle, he gave up, got mad at the cat, and vice versa. [...] Rob did get the thing on the cat with much less difficulty; she didn’t even seem to resent it. [...]

(Pause.) With Ruburt: The new orientation is bringing results, and the results do appear effortlessly.² The affair with Mitzi (one of our cats) did involve action at other levels — a magical orientation. [...]

(About Seth’s reference to Mitzi: Last month both of our cats, Mitzi and Billy, came down with heavy cases of fleas — quite unusual for them even though they are often outside. [...]