“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For that matter, there is far greater leeway in the behavior of animals than you understand, for you interpret animal behavior according to your own beliefs. You interpret the past history of your species in the same manner. It seems to you that the female always tended to the offspring, for example, nursing them, that she was forced to remain close to home while the male fought off enemies or hunted for food. The ranging male, therefore, appears to have been much more curious and aggressive. There was instead a different kind of situation. Children do not come in litters. The family of the caveman was a far more “democratic” group than you suppose — men and women working side by side, children learning to hunt with both parents, women stopping to nurse a child along the way, the species standing apart from others because it was not ritualized in sexual behavior.

If a mother died, the father took over her responsibilities, the qualities of love and affection being quite as alive in him as in the female. After a woman bore, she nursed the child, taking it with her on food-gathering excursions, or sometimes letting other women in the group nurse the child. Often after childbirth, women immediately joined the hunting expeditions, and the fathers made clothing from animals’ hides at home. This allowed the male to rest after prolonged hunting activity, and meant that no adult member of a family became over-exhausted. The work, then, was interchangeable.

Women were also somewhat lighter because they would bear the additional weight of a child. Even then, of course, there were variances, for many women are larger than small men. But the women could hunt as well as the men. If compassion, kindness, and gentleness were feminine characteristics only, then no male could be kind or compassionate because such feelings would not be biologically possible.

The family was a very cooperative unit. The basis of early society was cooperation, not competition. Families grouped together. There were children of various ages in such a band all the time. When women were near birth, they performed those chores that could be done in the cave dwellings, or nearby, and also watched other young children; while the women who were not pregnant were off with the males, hunting or gathering food.

[...] You are the person who hunts you down the years and the days. When you realize this, no other human being alive will have the power to hurt you or to hunt you. [...] He is hunting you because you are hunting yourself. [...]

[...] You would also learn things about yourself, and you would recognize the strength of your own individuality and not feel as though you had to go running hunted through the grasses, all kinds of grasses. [...]

[...] When you realize you are free, he will not bother you and you will not feel the need to be hunted. [...]

Now you were two brothers, you and your wife and you were herding animals and you were also hunting them. [...]

[...] Now the dog was a hunting dog. Symbolically you have always equated hunting with a man’s work in modern society. [...] You would not feel free to hunt successfully with the animal, for he was, you felt, the symbol of an unsuccessful hunt in the work world.

As Jane wrote at about this time in her manuscript for Psychic Politics: “So in house hunting I can almost feel the shape of my ideas and beliefs looking for their proper house.” [...] Politics, of course, contains extensive material on the same subject (as well as on our house-hunting adventures).

(We skipped last week’s two regularly scheduled sessions so that Jane could rest, and so we’d have more time to spend house hunting. [...]

(So far, Jane and I haven’t been able to find a home that we intuitively feel is the right one, although the place on Foster Avenue has intrigued us considerably since we first saw it on February 3. [Since then we’ve looked at many other houses.] Last Thursday afternoon [February 13], Jane was busy with her creative writing class so I went house hunting alone. [...]

[...] Anything on our house hunting, I thought, would be welcome here because it would help unite these late sessions for “Unknown” Reality with some of its much earlier ones [in Volume 1, as it turned out]. [...]

Jane didn’t tape this new Sumari, though—which we regretted—for she wasn’t able to get out of her chair to hunt for her recorder; I was too charmed just listening to her sing to think of a tape. [...]

I run ahead of the other girl, and around her, really hunting her down, yelling again dramatically and accusingly: “I ask myself, where are all my friends who were going to write no matter what, to work no matter what happened. [...]

[...] The disturbed person may immediately begin a long tirade, describing previous episodes in which he or she was hunted from city to city. [...]

[...] When it came time for me to leave, I started hunting around to find Billy. [...]

[...] That material makes an excellent ending for Volume 2. For Jane and me, our house-hunting adventures were an intensely interesting journey through a complicated skein of probabilities. [...]

[...] It is the feeling that the fugitive will always be hunted down and that there is safety in numbers and that if you leave the numbers, or the institution, you will be hunted down. [...]

[...] Men did not begin hunting animals until certain groups of animals needed a way to control their own population. [...]

[...] As the animal must play, mate, hunt his prey or eat his berries within the physical context of sun, ground, trees, snow, hail and wind, so in a different way man must pursue his ideas by clothing them in the elemental realities of earth, by perceiving them as events.

[...] Each animal knows that in time of hunger it might be hunted by another. [...]

[...] Hunters in primitive groups know how to hunt. [...]

[...] And in your hunting expeditions you sometimes came upon these. [...]

(We had been hunting through the taped session for particularly strong voice effects so that John could get an idea of the power of the Seth personality. [...]

[...] Your apartment hunting, because of its novelty, and his interest in decoration and arrangement, stirred his imagination in new way so took energy away from symptoms. [...]

(Jane did not meet the woman or children; she did meet the husband last year while job hunting.)

In other words, the emotional charges allow me to hunt for the item that you want me to identify. [...]

[...] Man’s pursuit of the good, to some extent now, fathered the Inquisition and the Salem witch hunts. [...]