“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The kitten merely represented wish fulfillment, in that Ruburt does plan to get a kitten as soon as he is home. In the experience the kitten was in the hospital room, and there seemed to be adjoining rooms, as at 458 (the address of the apartment house we’d lived in on W. Water Street). This signified that Ruburt was building up similarities between present and past experience, so that the kitten, appearing in the dream’s present and past also, would indeed appear in the future.

(“Do you want to answer my question from the session yesterday, about the reason for the kitten in Jane’s experience?”)

Ruburt and Joseph have a kitten. [...] It uses itself fully in mental activity in the same way that the kitten does in physical play.

(The weekend following Willy’s death, though, Jane insisted that we get a “new” kitten at once. [...]

Your kind of psychological reality is therefore implied in my own, and mine in yours, even as your kind of reality is implied in that of Willy Two (our kitten) — and his in yours.

[...] Then I thought that anyway, I could have a kitten here. We have two rooms and Rob could hide the kitten, and keep a litter box hidden too — how I didn’t know.”

(It would also be interesting to have Seth comment on the kitten, and its symbolism, in Jane’s experience.

1. Seth first mentioned viruses in the 17th session for January 26, 1964, when I asked him to comment upon the recent deaths of our dog, Mischa, at the age of 11, and of a pair of kittens Jane had obtained from the janitor of the art gallery where she worked part time. (The kittens had the same mother, but had come from successive litters.) I was 44 and Jane was 34, and in conventional terms both of us were still struggling—not only to learn about ourselves and the world, but to find our creative ways in that world. [...]

[...] A sick kitten was a dead kitten, not one who might recover.

[...] We’d taken him in as a stray kitten some four years ago. [...]

[...] In a “purely natural” setting you would not have as many living puppies or kittens. [...]

[...] Animals stricken by kitten and puppy diseases, for example, choose to die, pointing out the fact that the quality of their lives individually and en masse is vastly lacking. [...]

[...] The day before Willy (One) died, his expectations were no different than they were when he was a kitten. [...]

[...] The family living in it was moved and the shell boarded up — with Rooney, as a kitten, trapped inside. [...]

[...] You and Ruburt originally called it Katherine, however, when it was still a kitten, and before you finally succeeded in coaxing it into your house. [...]

(This afternoon Jane had some very good insights as to why we had taken in the kitten, Parmesan – who, incidentally, is now gone to the parents of friends, etc.)

[...] Seth’s remarks about Willy Two, or Billy, as we sometimes call him now, were obviously made in response to the funny annoyance we’d felt before the session, when the kitten had been in great form; jumping all over the furniture, pawing at the curtains — as well as Jane and me — getting in our papers, and so forth.)

[...] The kitten was a way of bringing attitudes and problems to the surface, while incidentally helping a young animal. [...]

[...] The death of a kitten that year led me to write:

[...] A young kitten is treated differently than an older one. [...]

[...] The nebulous nature of the “psychic” has served to help build up a picture of an unrealistic superself (long pause), mentioned earlier, that is supposed to perform a dazzling array of activities, solving everyone’s problems, displaying all of the psychic abilities at once, from healing to finding a lost kitten. [...]

[...] You always recognize pleasure in work, but the body also enjoys its own creature-reality, as any animal enjoys stroking—and in the past you have stroked your kitten more than you have each other.

[...] I also know that as I prepare these notes our 7-month-old kittens, Billy Two and Mitzi, are racing through the house.

[...] They would be a commonplace in the animal world, for instance; witness the quick deaths of certain newborn kittens in a litter (as Jane and I have); or consider the puppy in an animal shelter, or pound, certain to be put to death in a few days if no one gives it a home. [...]

Then tonight she began writing “a fun thing” about our cats, Billy and Mitzi, who are brother and sister just 10 months old now: “In the beginning, Billy and Mitzi weren’t even kittens yet, but only bits of sky and cloud that wanted to be pussycats. [...]

[...] The day after that, a dear friend brought us two six-week-old kittens, littermates fresh from a nearby farm. [...]