A Letter From Rob

By Robert F. Butts

To many, the following event may seem, if not trivial, at least hardly important in light of the many "serious and larger" questions involving the beliefs and actions of human beings, but from my own perspective it stirred up a number of questions related to the work of my wife, Jane Roberts, with the Seth material. And for those reasons it made an impression upon me that I won't forget.

After dark on January 4, 1997, on my way to a supper and party at the home of friends who lived in the country outside Elmira, I killed a pheasant with my car. I was driving alone on the west branch of Dry Run Road, a route curving through the hills a few miles west of the city, when the bird, a large male in the full brilliance of its winter plumage—its iridescent reds and oranges, blues and greens seemed to be alive in the headlights of my station wagon—walked out of the brush on the right side of the narrow road as I rounded a curve at low speed. It did that amazing thing perhaps 20 feet in front of me. I experienced a frozen shocked disbelief at what was happening. Yet how acute our senses can be, even so: I saw with exquisite detail the pheasant's gorgeous colors, aflame in the car's headlights. I barely got my foot on the brake pedal before the bird disappeared from view below the wagon's hood. In retrospect I have the feeling that at the last moment the pheasant lifted its wings as though to escape its mechanical nemesis, but then I heard—and felt—the thump through the car's floor and knew that that effort had been too late.

It was all over before I could even slow down, almost brake to a stop. I didn't stop, though. I saw no place where I could safely pull off the narrow road. I'd caught occasional glimpses of a car's lights some distance ahead of me, and I didn't want to be stopped in the road if a car came along behind me. There are a few farms along Dry Run Road, and thus a modest amount of traffic.

The lives we've chosen to experience in this probable reality can be so strange, though. Over the Christmas season, while spending many days replying to several hundred greetings from many states in this country and from a number of other countries, I'd thought about writing this letter for RC on the subject of beauty. What a modest idea! Actually, I'd made notes for such a piece more than a year ago, and filed them. Now what, I'd wondered often lately, could one possibly state that's new about beauty? Wouldn't it be presumptuous to even try to expound upon such a subject? Everyone experiences beauty, each in his or her own way. Don't they? Or can some shut it out of their realities? But at least beauty's idea is inescapable, I thought defensively—one of the glorious gifts we've been given, and accepted and developed, from All That Is, if we choose to use it.

I don't think much of the dictionary definitions of beauty, though. They seem too general, without hitting any intensity even if they do imply that beauty is "whatever pleases the senses or mind." I want more. A lot more, while wondering just how I expect mere words to really match states of actual perception and feeling that can range from the sublime to the ecstatic.

Until the pheasant episode, though, I hadn't dwelled much upon the idea of beauty mixed up with tragedy, while being sure in the abstract that beauty, or at least elements of that concept, is inherent in everything, everywhere. To me, killing that creature while on my way to a celebration certainly sent mixed signals: Why had that beautiful pheasant and I chosen to create that reality? Ah, there was the nub of my unease! I came to the end of Dry Run Road up in the hills and in the inky blackness turned left on Peacefield Road, itself a dead-end road but a very short one enclosed by dense woods. The party was at the next to last house, the A-frame home of Gene and Carroll. They're teachers in Elmira schools. Jane and I had met them shortly after moving into our own hill house in West Elmira in 1975; in fact, Gene had helped our friend Floyd Waterman (I'll call him) do carpentry work on our place.

There were more than 20 people at the supper and party. Some were friends I hadn't seen for a long time, since in my own way I'm a hermit even if I do live within the comfortable confines of a part of Elmira, and not out in the open country. Jane became the same way after we'd moved from the apartment house we had lived in for 15 years in downtown Elmira. She had conducted her ESP classes there from December 1967 to February 1975. When we moved, she gave up the idea of class. I should add that she did so partly because she often didn't feel at her best—but also, she said, because she felt that class time was over. In addition, we had become very busy meeting book deadlines. She died in September 1984.

Gene told me that Laurel and I had last been to his and Carroll's house six years ago. I couldn't believe it. I reminded him that long before that he'd fired in his kiln soup bowls for Jane and me, with our names on them; the handle of Jane's had broken off some time ago; I'd repaired it with a superglue but didn't use it; mine was still whole and I used it almost every day.

Also to my delight, Floyd Waterman and his wife were there. I'd expected to see them, according to Gene and Carroll's invitation, but not their beautiful daughter, who lived in the South. Present also were the Watermans' two sons and their wives and children; those two families live in the country near Elmira. Floyd and his wife, both retired, now live in Phoenix, Arizona. Jane and I had met Floyd when he joined ESP class. Besides being a contractor he'd also owned and operated a farm on Dry Run Road. He's a big strong man with a sharp, puckish sense of humor, a great love for and of animals, and a strong ability as a mimic, among other talents like cooking. More than once he'd entertained Jane and me by acting out the behaviors and sounds of the sheep, fowl, dogs, cats, and other animals he'd taken such loving care of on his farm. He'd been the first person to offer me comfort after Jane's death, saying I shouldn't be alone then.

With his ascerbic comments and stories about the human condition, Floyd can still make me laugh until my eyes water. And, Laurel says, I need that relaxation.

It was only natural that I told Floyd about killing the pheasant, and how the episode was bothering me. I said I already knew that the pheasant and I had created something I'd remember always, that in those few seconds life for the bird and me had changed for good, even though I was sure the bird still lives "where it is now." Floyd was the only one at the party to whom I could speak that way, although later I did mention the pheasant to a few others, and received sympathetic comments in conventional terms. I don't mean to denigrate those responses in any way: It was just that not many present knew of Jane's and my work, and how, because of that, I almost automatically thought in certain terms. But I had special connections with Floyd: Even as we talked over our homemade beers (courtesy of Gene) in that crowded and noisy room, I thought again about writing this letter for RC on beauty—which then led to my remembering the excellent dream I'd had involving Floyd and myself some 17 years ago, in which I'd created fantastic, indescribably beautiful jewel-like walls of living colors while the two of us had been in a department store in my home town of Sayre, Pennsylvania. (There's much more to the dream. See Session 900, with notes, for February 11, 1980, in Volume 1 of Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment.)

Now there was beauty too, and plenty of it! I can still see it. Personal beauty of my own creation, undefinable really, yet a perception of a "timeless,' tender yet powerful universal presence—All That Is, in other words. I'd futilely tried to depict that living color in oil paint. And Floyd told me now that when he'd had his farm on Dry Run Road he'd heard that others had experienced pheasants walking into the road—perhaps attracted by automobile headlights. I wasn't to feel bad, yet...

Some of the men at the party were, I knew, hunters. Now how, I wondered without judgment, did they fit in their ideas of beauty with the deliberate taking of life? I remembered hearing one of Gene's guests describe a couple of years earlier the killing with bow and arrow of "a big beautiful buck." And that buck had been beautiful; I was sure of that without having seen it. I also remembered that Seth had briefly remarked once that so far hunting has served deep purposes for human beings during the millenia of our development, and that eventually we'll dispense with it. I wish I could find those few lines within the many thousands of pages of Seth material. They could even have been published, but in an odd, contradictory and irritating way I don't want to interrupt the rhythm of my focus on this letter to search the books and/or unpublished material for them.

I saw no sign of the pheasant's body on curving, hilly Dry Run Road after I left Gene and Carroll's A-frame several hours later; as the narrow road unwound beneath the car's headlights I couldn't even identify the exact spot where bird and car had collided. Since my friend Laurel hadn't attended the supper and party, I had to relive the episode when I described it to her at the hill house. I could return to the pheasant's iridescent colors almost effortlessly, it seemed, as though in that flash of a second they had been enlarged and imprinted upon my psyche, yet I had no desire to make a drawing, to try even a quick sketch of the event, as I often do for vivid dreams. And what were, and still are, that bird's own ideas, uses, and understandings of beauty—its own and others'? Certainly, no natural protective coloration or mimicry of its environment applied in its case in these sere winter months.

How ironic, for without that marvel of technology, the automobile (even if mine is nine years old), I'd never have experienced the beauty created by the pheasant and me, and the pheasant would have lived. It lives now within the creativity of my psyche, and within its own, I'll bet, in more than one probability. What part of the bird is me, and what part of me is the bird? I don't want to get too complicated here—I am already!—but I hope that in its own way that creature is "happy" with its choice.

Which shows the conscious-and-conventional trap I can fall into, even with what I think I know. Why am I regretting the pheasant's right to walk in front of my car? My emotions certainly want to know, for they too insist upon their full play. I think that emotions are one of the premier foundations of our chosen reality. This thinking/feeling can be carried to ridiculous (if entirely understandable) lengths, of course: I can easily claim that the pheasant affair wouldn't have happened if Jane's and my old friends hadn't invited me to their supper and party in the first place. But that's no excuse. Why stop there? Why not follow each cause back, and back, tracing out with the greatest care how each event has its prior events? A whole convoluted series of them, reaching back how far? To one's birth, say? But why stop there? Isn't that what history is, in our ordinary terms?

But we "reasonable" human beings have to stop some- where, otherwise we'll end up lost in an endless questioning and justification of everything we do. So let us keep our beloved reality functioning on those levels we're used to. I only ask that in some conscious or near-conscious portion of each of our psyches we stay aware of this interconnected reality we're jointly creating for much larger reasons—even if it is all simultaneous! To me, this "background knowledge" makes our daily, more circumscribed lives and challenges more precious than ever....

January 10 was my night to go running. The temperature was a warm 25 degrees above zero. My habit of over 10 years has been to run at least three miles at a time, three days a week, late at night. This is very relaxing after a day's hard work, and at 77 I'm glad I can still do it, without complications. I try to remain faithful to my schedule, although I'm not rigid about it. Rain or snow, or even work, will keep me home if heavy enough! But usually I'm out in all but the coldest weather; I much prefer this to using a comfortable indoor track. The late night has its own beauty each time, in each season, in each kind of weather. A block from the hill house on Pinnacle Road, Coleman Avenue continues bearing steadily uphill on its twisting route for another mile and a half. This is no small challenge to run. The few houses sit farther and farther apart. A half-dozen or so automobiles may pass; I turn on my flashlight and get off the road each time. When I reach my usual turn-around point at the top of the hill and look south toward the valley holding Elmira, I often see a world enveloped in a sweet cocoon of quiet, and, regularly, moonlit beauty. Visibility is actually much greater in the winter, for the bare trees don't restrict one's view so much, but they don't cushion a raw wind, either!

"Gee," I said to Laurel as I put on a second set of clothes, "that fire alarm has been going for a long time…."

She agreed. I'd finally become aware that the alarm's mournful peals had been rolling up the hillside from the valley much longer than usual. I said I thought that the fire lay in an outlying district of the city.

The alarm had fallen silent by the time I'd bundled up, left the hill house and walked the block down Pinnacle Road to its intersection with Coleman Avenue. There was no snow. I expected to turn right on Coleman and start jogging toward the open country. Instead, I discovered at least part of the reason for the drawn-out alarms from the valley: A fire engine was parked on Coleman just north of the intersection, with its bevy of rich red lights flashing. A couple of hundred feet up the road, just before it curved out of sight, I saw a second fire engine parked, and, I thought, a police car. Both of those vehicles had their warning lights on also. To me, the three sets of lights flashed in a brilliantly-colored kaleidoscopic pattern. There were no signs of fire in a house nearby. Men up the road were running back and forth. Then I realized that Laurel and I hadn't heard any fire engine sirens blasting up Coleman from the valley. So what was going on? I watched a few southbound automobiles being guided around the fire engines and the police car, but decided I didn't want to compromise the peaceful run I'd planned by picking my way past the city's vehicles—and that, I allowed myself to realize as I headed downhill, in the opposite direction, was an excuse: All of those flashing lights, so beautiful and compelling, had at once reminded me of the glare within which I had first seen the pheasant six nights ago, then killed it...

Like the rungs of a hillside ladder, say, several very short, one-block side streets branch off Coleman below Pinnacle Road, just as Pinnacle itself, the top road on the hill, does. These little streets have older but upscale homes set among arching trees, nice lawns, and no sidewalks. The well-kept neighborhood could be almost anywhere. Its streets are mercifully much more level than my usual route on Coleman, and it was on them that I took up running in earnest after Jane's death 12 years ago. At their far ends they join Greenaway Road, which for a few blocks heads downhill parallel to Coleman. All was quiet at that late hour, and suddenly I found it very evocative to be back on them, passing the corner streetlights, the occasional lighted window. I turned down Greenaway off Crestwood Road, approached Parker Road—and caught movement in the yard of the house at the intersection.

At first I thought the two figures were larger dogs, silently romping in the shadows, but as they moved under the streetlight I saw that they were young deer. All of us stopped and stared, some dozen feet apart. I had never been so close to "wild" deer before. They were so beautiful in their gangly innocence, yet I felt a bit of a shock: Why were these half-grown animals by themselves, seemingly without any elders? I didn't know how I appeared to them, but in contrast to the pheasant's blatant display of audacious color their protective coloration fit in well with the brown and cold winter evening. Every time I see deer I'm struck by what appears to be their vulnerability, and wonder how they survive. Finally, I began walking slowly down Greenaway (backward for the first dozen steps), and under the streetlight the animals started nosing among what I took to be the remnants of lichens and small plants that had grown in a plot in front of the house.

Finally I trotted several blocks down Greenaway, then began returning uphill at a slower pace. The deer at the intersection? Now there were five of them! Four youngsters and a full-grown doe. All had crossed the road and stood motionless, regarding me a few feet away from beneath small trees. Once again I stopped. I was glad the young ones hadn't been entirely alone after all, although my earlier sense of confrontation returned as I walked slowly past this larger group. Any unease was surely a projection on my part, I thought, yet had there been animals on each side of the road I wouldn't have wanted to walk between them...

Midnight wasn't far off as I trudged the last block up Coleman Avenue to Pinnacle Road. The fire engines and the police car were still there, with all of their mesmerizing lights still flashing. Now, though, a van from one of the local television stations was also present. It was parked on Pinnacle as I turned right and headed past it toward the hill house. Whatever had happened seemed to be over, for a younger man, not carrying anything (like a camera, for example) returned to the van and drove away. I heard voices joking back by the closest fire engine; talk about a football game; sounds as though gear of some kind was being moved, maybe packed. For sure, there hadn't been a fire.

"Well," I said to Laurel as I got out of my hooded jacket, "there'll be news about it in tomorrow's paper...." I was getting more and more relaxed in the indoor warmth. All I wanted to do was to forget everything else and have a snack while I did a crossword puzzle before going to bed. So why, seemingly in spite of myself, was I thinking about the beauty I'd met so starkly in the pheasant, so dramatically in the fire-engine and police-car lights, so evocatively in the cold night, and so wonderingly (with that taste of confrontation) in the deer?

There wasn't anything in the next morning's Star-Gazette about what had happened on Coleman Avenue. We searched the paper several times to make sure.

No published news about it the next day, the 12th, either.

I started writing this letter on that day, Sunday, however, after having spent several days thinking about it while answering mail and preparing gessoed boards for oil paintings of episodes from various dreams. Some of the rough sketches I'll be using for reference aren't only from months, but years, ago. I'm planning to paint my dreams on a much larger scale than I've used so far. I'm also planning to concentrate on painting dreams for as long as I'm able, for I've learned that they will provide me with an endless, uniquely creative, often beautiful and often unconventional source of inspiration. I can't ask for more.

After midnight, on the 13th, I dreamed about my younger brother Linden (I'll call him), who had died in October 1995:

After a motor trip to a small town, I sat across from him at a table in a bare motel room while he began scrawling copy across a colored drawing I had made. That he would so deliberately deface my work made me very angry and I got up to leave. When I looked back at him he lay on a mattress with his body wrapped in an old discolored white sheet; I could see only the top of his head. Linden had been almost bald at his death, but in the dream I saw his pate covered by the beautiful curly yellow hair that he'd had in early childhood. There's more to the dream, including what I believe are reincarnational overtones, but the portion I want to paint—the artistic and emotional challenges I chose—contains the stark contrasts of beauty I saw through my anger: Linden wrapped in the old sheet with only his yellow hair showing.

A few hours later, when Laurel and I read the Star-Gazette during breakfast, we finally learned what had happened on Coleman Avenue three nights ago: A driver speeding north had lost control of his car, which hit two trees on the other side of the road, spun around, and almost went over a steep bank into a creek. The driver received facial stitches in a hospital after being arrested. The Chemung County Sheriff's Department had been assisted by the West Elmira Fire Department. Evidently I had missed the activities involving a tow truck while running on the side streets below Pinnacle Road and encountering the deer, but I still vividly saw all of those flashing lights as I read the newspaper account.

I even gave up my scheduled runs to get extra freedom to work on this letter during the next several days. During this time I was quite aware that certain persistent musings were leading to another challenge: to reverse, or rather to become aware of, my need to make some sort of drawing of my killing the pheasant. Finally, lying in bed on the 17th, after midnight, I admitted that I'd have to see what I could do. The morning was cold—about 10 degrees above zero. After I'd let the station wagon warm up in the driveway, I went back out to sit in it with my clipboard, drawing paper and pen to see if a preliminary sketch could help me create something I'd eventually consider showing to others.

Of course, what I had feared would happen, happened: This graphic project really got a creative hold on me, and broke my concentration on writing. What emerged out of that first crude drawing, I ruefully but humorously learned over the next few days, was more like a schema of the event, a diagram, than anything else. I wanted to show myself from behind as I reacted to seeing the pheasant walk into the road, but my body covered the steering wheel; that didn't matter so much, I decided—but if I was to be really accurate from the perspective I'd chosen, the front seat with its headrest would cover my head and body, and maybe the pheasant too. So I ignored those niceties. I trust that the final drawing contains at least hints of that irrevocable moment before the pheasant disappeared below the car's hood. And while I worked so intently on the drawing, I couldn't wait to begin struggling to regain the rhythm that I really have to have in writing.

When I finally got back to that challenge after finishing the drawing on Monday, the 20th, a dream account in my file on beauty helped a lot in returning me to the serenity and focus I needed, for I felt comforted by my extended family. I have yet to make any drawings based on this dream of almost exactly two years ago, but my psyche can always surprise itself! In the meantime, here's an abbreviated account of the dream:

"Early Saturday morning, January 7, 1995.

"I woke up after having this long and luxurious dream and told myself that I'd remember it. I dreamed that I was conversing with other members of the Butts family in a beautiful area of grass and trees near water, like a pond or river. The day was sublime—warm and sunny beneath a blue sky and small white clouds. Indeed, the setting was glowing and ideal, almost perfect, and it's this wonderful ambience that I recall. My deceased parents were present, and other family members from other lifetimes. This is the true heart of the dream, that reincarnation/simultaneous time is involved, symbolized by the idyllic setting and my loving interactions with others from my "past, present, and future." Whatever was taking place in the dream I accepted wholeheartedly and with the greatest enjoyment. As I began to wake up I was sorry the experience was over, even while I luxuriated in having had it...."

I'm finishing this letter some 10 days later. I'd made few plans for it, yet am surprised at the way my psyche put it together. Often I just let the letters happen, which gives a lot of freedom in "composing" them (if that's the right word to use). Not that I don't end up slaving over each word, for I do. And things get crowded out: I'd wanted to write much more about the wonderful and varied senses of animals, for example. I can't see my work as others do, obviously. Maybe I've triggered some memories, understandings, insights. Maybe I've touched upon an extra dimension or two—but even if I have, this doesn't stop me from wanting more! And that, I think, is the classic sign of human creativity: that creative dissatisfaction that leads us, cajoles us, indeed demands that we leap forward in whatever way or ways possible.

It's great that Seth explains how other portions of our selves—perhaps too many to ever list—exist elsewhere. I try to keep that feeling in a conscious background of mind, while leaving psychic, psychological, and physical "space" here, to do what's possible here.