Death of Jane/Rob's cat at age 3/'Seth, you don't understand!'

[Mark M]

You thought about the possibility of your cat's death and imagined how short his lifespan
would have been. And of course this in turn aroused feelings of the vulnerability of life to time,
so that it seemed as if life was but a short, bright but tragic candle that would be extinguished
one way or another, and that the light itself showed by its illumination how black everything is
beyond his reach.

(8:50 p.m.) Such feelings are all the result of the beliefs you have adopted from your society.
Ruburt picked up another thought of mine this evening, and he mentally replied: 'Seth, you
don't understand!'

I told him that for animals the eternal present, the spacious present, is an actually
experienced reality, a real framework of existence. Despite Ruburt's indignant objection,
animals do not 'think' of long lives or short lives, but of a brilliant present, which in a way,
compared to your framework, has no beginning or end . . . time, in your terms, does not exist
for them — and in the deepest of terms, a life's quality on a human scale cannot be judged
primarily in terms of its length, either.

--Seth, Session 836, Monday, 02-26-1979, machine translation from German

Your desires and Billy's merged to a certain extent. He didn't want to go out into
the world. He was quite happy with his home and his porch. He was introspective in his own
way, longing for the other parts of himself that had been born into the same litter.

You'll have to give me a moment here for concepts that are difficult to explain. (But there was
no break.) As I said, identities can mix and merge while remaining themselves. Underline this sentence
and we will come back to it.

Billy knew that you would let him out at night and also that Ruburt was making another
attempt to walk properly and go out into the world. But he had other goals. He didn't want to
stay connected to the earth, but rather join other parts of himself that were elsewhere. The
reality of animals provides an excellent basis by which consciousness can be earth-born and
contribute to and be shaped by a reality, while remaining relatively free from other questions
that, for various reasons, may not concern it. However, emotions are always involved.
That will have to do for tonight, but next time I want to start with the last sentence that I had
you underline.

But under no circumstances should you blame yourself. Billy reunited with other parts of
himself and he felt a sense of separation in his life because he had come into life as a group
with others who had the intention of ending their experience together and he was looking for a
dignified way out without hurting your feelings.

--Seth, Session 837, Wednesday, 02-28-1979, machine translation from German