“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Late last night I stepped out onto the screened-in back porch of the hill house. Our black-and-white cat, Mitzi, followed me. We’re having the house painted, and I could smell the acrylic odor. The woods on the hill in back of the house echoed with the stridulations of the cicadas and katydids. When I went outside I made sure the porch door was latched so that Mitzi couldn’t get out; she sat silhouetted against the light coming from the kitchen window as she watched me walk down the driveway. It was the natural time for her to be free, I thought. We’d had Mitzi spayed three weeks ago, when she was seven months old. [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. We’ve also felt bad over our long-standing decision to keep them in the house; they can roam no farther than the front and back porches. Both porches are screened in down to the floor and furnish the only contacts Billy and Mitzi have with the outside environment.

I often consider those insights when observing both the wild and domesticated animal life, as well as the bird life, around the hill house. 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. I also noted that in a session on animal consciousness Jane held just three days ago, Seth had to some extent assuaged our feelings on such questions, and that his information will be of value to others. The session, the 878th, was held on September 10, 1979, and it began at 9:07 P.M. Monday—just five regular sessions after Seth had completed his work on Mass Events, and three before he began Dreams. Earlier that day I’d made a wadded-up paper ball for Mitzi to play with. Using her lightning-quick reflexes, she kept knocking it around the living room and beneath Jane’s rocker as my wife went into trance, then began to speak. Here are session excerpts:)

Observing the antics of your Mitzi gives me an excuse to begin the topic of the evening: animal consciousness.

Domesticated animals have their own reasons for choosing such a state. It is, for example, usual enough to think that your cats (Billy and Mitzi) should ideally run outside in the open, because in the wild that is what cats would do.

(Actually, it’s taken me a long time—a little over three years—to round out these preliminary notes for the session that follows. When I finished them, then, it was nighttime again, September 23, 1982, late, and once again I stepped off the back porch of the hill house for some fresh air. [Mitzi didn’t watch me this time.] Much has taken place in Jane’s and my lives since 1979, as it has for everyone else, but here in the light of the corner streetlight the scene outside our place was just as magical and mysterious as ever. That’s what we love about it. In the warm evening the silent road still ran uphill past the house and into the woods. The cicadas and the katydids still sounded their hypnotic rhythms, I’ve heard geese often lately, moving south in noisy waves, and we’ve had deer in our driveway several times. I looked for rabbits or ‘coon or deer now, but didn’t see any of those creatures.