“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(To Florence:) Far be it from me to disturb your ancient ideas of yin and yang, or Jung, or good and evil, or of right and wrong, or of good and bad vibrations! [...]

Now our Florence is working with her own ideas of good and evil, searching for what she thinks of as an aesthetic and moral code that she can rely upon. [...]

For there is also a version of our Florence, a young man in China, who does not weigh even 70 pounds, and who is 26 years old. [...] It does not particularly help that young man when our Florence piles on weight because she then feels less vulnerable, and more protected from her world.

Man is of good intent. When you see evil everywhere in man’s intent — in your own actions and those of others — then you set yourself up against your own existence, and that of your kind. [...] You will not see man’s good intent, or you will do so ironically — for in comparison with your ideals, good in the world appears to be so minute as to be a mockery.

[...] His intentions are evil. Wars are basically examples of mass suicide — embarked upon, however, with all of the battle’s paraphernalia, carried out through mass suggestion, and through the nation’s greatest resources, by men who are convinced that the universe is unsafe, that the self cannot be trusted, and that strangers are always hostile. [...] These paranoiac tendencies are largely hidden beneath man’s nationalistic banners.

Many young men and women have come to adulthood in fine ranch houses in good neighborhoods. [...]

[...] When you think in terms of possession, you are thinking again in antiquated terms of good and evil. [...]

[...] Remember also, that any abilities that you see displayed by the personality of Ruburt are abilities of human personality, latent in each of you, are to be used as you will and as you wish for you are possessed, possessed by ideas that are limited and that restrain you. [...] I have said this many times and doubtlessly I will continue to say—when Ruburt’s familiar body is some 40 years older and my voice in comparison to Ruburt’s sounds like quite a young man (shouts)—That my energy should remind you of the energy that is inherent within yourself and that any energy that sweeps through this small frame comes from the same energy that gives you your vitality and strength and that should bring you joy and fulfillment. [...]

[...] But many men and women are indeed starving. [...] Free will is yours, however, and if you decide to ignore these inner realities you can destroy your planet and it will do you no good to cry to a God, for the God would not have destroyed your planet. [...]

[...] Limited, dogmatic, or rigid concepts of good and evil can hold you back. [...]

[...] In such cases, through perhaps a group of existences, you will find yourself battling against ideas of good and evil, running about in a circle of confusion, doubt, and anxiety.

[...] I am telling you again, therefore, that many of your ideas of good and evil are highly distortive, and shadow all understanding you have of the nature of reality.

[...] Acts which fit in with the good-intended universe, in which basically each life and detail, seeking its good, also works for the good of all others, bring forth what you call good acts—simple enough acts which are not well-intentioned in that light, toward the self or others “do not work right.” [...] They bring pain, sorrow, or illness to the self or to others, and they are often called evil acts. [...]

(As we were eating lunch today Jane said she thought Seth would discuss the question of good and evil, re our conversation on those subjects the other day. [...] Once I’d written it down, I saw that its subject matter fit in very well with the idea of good and evil, and told Jane I hoped Seth would use it in any discussion of his own.

You have been considering the nature of good and evil, and in your dream you presented yourself with a capsule demonstration. It is good to eat, and each creature seeks food. [...]

[...] One man, passionately willing, good or evil, can overbalance, literally, a hundred men. [...]

Now, good evening.

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

[Men] saw that there must be an exchange of physical energy for the world to continue. They watched the drama of the “hunter” and the “prey,” seeing that each animal contributed so that the physical form of the earth could continue—but the rabbit eaten by the wolf survived in a dream body that men knew was its true form. When man “awakened” in his physical body, however, and specialized in the use of its senses, he no longer perceived the released dream body of the slain animal running away, still cavorting on the hillside. [...] Some stimuli were to be sought out, and others avoided, and so over a period of time he translated the pleasant and the unpleasant into rough versions of good and evil.

(Long pause in a steady, rather fast delivery.) Man’s dream body is still with him, of course, but the physical body now obscures it. The dream body cannot be harmed while the physical one can—as man quickly found out as he transformed his experience largely from one to the other. In the dream body man feared nothing. [...] In their dream bodies men had watched the spectacle of animals “killing” other animals, and they saw the animals’ dream bodies emerge unscathed.

3. At first, as I typed this session from my notes a couple of days later, I thought that Seth had contradicted himself here, for earlier in the session he’d stated that “the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man’s did.” Then I came to think that Seth actually meant that man has consciously separated himself from his dream body to a greater degree than other creatures have—that even though those other entities became “physically effective” before man did, they still retain a greater awareness of their dream bodies than man does. [...]

Here you find stories of black magicians; and, once more, age enters in so that the legends of the wise old man or woman rise into folklore. Death is viewed in terms of value judgments of good and evil and black and white — the annihilation of consciousness being perceived as black, and its resurrection as white.

Now: Good evening —

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

“By the time” that the Garden of Eden tale reached your biblical stories, the entire picture had already been seen in the light of concepts about good and evil that actually appeared, in those terms, a long time later in man’s development. The inner reincarnational structure of the human psyche is very important in man’s physical survival. [...]

(9:17.) Each species is endowed also, by virtue of the units of consciousness that compose it, with an overall inner picture of the condition of each other species (pause), and further characterized by basic impulses so that it is guided toward choices that best fulfill its own potentials for development while adding to the overall good of the entire world consciousness. This does not curtail free will any more than man’s free will is curtailed because he must (underlined) grow from a fetus into an adult instead of the other way around.

[...] Man possesses free will, but that free will operates only within man’s degree—that is, his free will is somewhat contained by the frameworks of time and space.

In evolution man’s nature is amoral, and anything goes for survival’s sake. [...] The fundamentalists would rather believe in man’s inherent sinful nature, for at least their belief system provides for a framework in which he can be saved. Christ’s message was that each man is good inherently, and is an individualized portion of the divine — and yet a civilization based upon that precept has never been attempted. The vast social structures of Christianity were instead based upon man’s “sinful” nature — not the organizations and structures that might allow him to become good, or to obtain the goodness that Christ quite clearly perceived man already possessed.

(9:49.) Because man has not understood the characteristics of the world of imagination, he has thus far always insisted upon turning his myths into historical fact, for he considers the factual world alone as the real one. A man, literally of flesh and blood, must then prove beyond all doubt that each and every other [human being] survives death — by dying, of course, and then by rising, physically-perceived, into heaven. Each man does survive death, and each woman (with quiet amusement), but only such a literal-minded species would insist upon the physical death of a god-man as “proof of the pudding.”

[...] They will see the world in black-and-white terms again, with good and evil clearly delineated in the most simplistic terms, and thus escape a slippery, thematic universe, in which man’s feelings seemed to give him no foothold at all.

If a young adult believes that sex is good but old age is bad, then he or she will find it impossible to consider exuberant sexuality as a portion of an older person’s experience. In the dream state the child and the old man or woman can exist simultaneously, and the individual is made quite aware of the full range of creaturehood.

[...] You deny yourself many of these advantages however through the artificial alienation that you have set up by your present wake-sleep patterns, to which, again, your ideas of good and evil are intimately connected.

[...] Your beliefs of good and evil will become much more clear to you, and you will no longer need to project repressed tendencies out upon others in exaggerated fashion.

In the next chapter, let us consider more closely your ideas about good and evil, the morality of the self, and examine the ways in which your ideas are reflected in your lives.

No man or woman consciously knows for sure which day will be the last for him or her in this particular life, that each calls the present one. [...] Birth and death contain between them the earthly experience that you perceive as happening within a given period of time, through various seasons, and involving unique perceptions within areas of space — encountered with other human beings, all to one extent or another sharing with you events caused by the intersection of the self and time and space.

Good evening.

[...] (Pause.) Dineen heartily believes in good and evil; so, being convinced that she was at the mercy of demoniacal forces, she began to pray. As Ruburt pointed out, however, the prayers themselves were merely a weak surrender to the idea that evil is so powerful. They were not based on any real belief in the power of good, but only upon a superstitious hope that if bad forces exist, good ones must also.

[...] The man who has believed that he was evil may now see the world, or persons of another faith or political affiliation, as evil instead. [...]

[...] She is a heroine, battling cosmic forces of good and evil, important enough so that another person even wants to control her. [...]

(Pause.) Men can become deranged if they believe life has no meaning. [...] It denies man the practical use of those very elements that he needs as a biological creature: the feeling that he is at life’s center, that he can act safely in his environment, that he can trust himself, and that his being and his actions have meaning.

Ideas of good and evil are exaggerated, cut off from each other. [...]

What protection, then, but to effectively project these outside of the self — impulses of good as well as evil — and hence effectively block organized action?

Women make a grave error when they try to prove their “equality” with men by showing that they can enter the armed forces, or go into combat as well as any man (with more amusement). [...] Women have shown uncommon good sense in not going to war, and uncommon bad sense by sending their sons and lovers to war. [...]

Fanatics always use ringing rhetoric, and speak in the highest terms of truth, good and evil, and particularly of retribution. To some extent capital punishment is the act of a fanatical society: The taking of the murderer’s life does not bring back the victim’s, and it does not prevent other men from [committing] such crimes. [...]

(Pause.) Fanatics exist because of the great gap between an idealized good and an exaggerated version of its opposite. The idealized good is projected into the future, while its exaggerated opposite is seen to pervade the present. [...] Behind all this is the belief that spontaneously the ideal will never be achieved, and that, indeed, on his own man is getting worse and worse in every aspect: How can flawed selves ever hope to spontaneously achieve any good?

[...] You have a propensity for wanting to think in terms of hierarchies of consciousness, with humanity at the top of the list, in global terms. The Bible, for example, says that man is put in dominion over the animals, and it seems as if upgrading the consciousnesses of animals must somehow degrade your own. [...]

(Pause.) Nor can this concept fit into your versions of good and evil, as I will explain later in this book. [...]

[...] The Moslem militants released 13 of our citizens—5 white women and 8 black men—who returned home by Thanksgiving Day, but this time they kept in bondage the remaining 53 Americans. [...]

[...] It seemed to him that he did not offer what most men expected of women, so that if he wanted a good lifelong companion he had to tread lightly. He felt that many of his own characteristics were considered disadvantageous in a man-woman relationship.”

“The main issues with which the sinful self was concerned were focused most clearly in Mass Events and God of Jane,” Seth told us, “since more than the other books they represent a direct confrontation, ‘attacking’ the very legitimacy of the entire concept of sin and evil, insisting more dramatically on the good intent of man’s basic impulses…. [...]

Religion was hampered—and is—by its own interpretation of good and evil, but it did not deny the existence of other versions of consciousness, or differing kinds of psychological activity and life. [...]

I said before that no man acts out of the desire to be evil, but has always justified to himself his actions precisely by his own “good” intent. [...] The religious area in general, from time immemorial, has dealt intensely and sometimes one-mindedly with “the good ideal.” That ideal, however, different in one area than in another, was usually self-righteously applied with a vengeance and fanatical zest, so that all things outside it were seen as evil.

[...] In such concepts any natural goodness, or natural intent in man becomes not only invisible psychologically to the fanatic, but man’s natural nature appears as a direct threat to the ideal projected by dogma of any kind.

The more narrow and strict your conceptions of the good become, the larger and more threatening the “powers of evil” seem to grow.

[...] Now, I tell you, and I have told you many times, and regardless of how intellectually confusing it may sound to you in greater terms, there simply is no evil. And as long as you are aware of what seems to be evil effects then you are still in ignorance. [...] Whatever violence you did you did because you thought it was good and met a worthy end then; therefore, be careful of those ideas that you entertain now and what you will do to defend them. [...] The most bloodthirsty acts have been done because men believed themselves right and so they killed to uphold their worthy ideas. [...]

[...] They were intense encounters with good and evil as you understood them at the time and when you acted, you acted according to your terms of good and evil. Therefore, be careful of those ideas now that you entertain of good and evil. [...]

[...]  There is good without evil and this is simply the state of your understanding at this time. [...]

[...] If you are not careful, you see, you end up with whole leagues of in quotes “devils and angels,” only completely disconnected from human personality. Independent agents of good or evil, out to tempt men or save them, as the case may be.

Good evening.

(“Good evening, Seth.”)