“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) Sometimes you think of suicide as ignominious and passive, but of war as aggressive and powerful. Both are equally the result of passivity and distorted aggression, and of natural pathways of communication not used or understood. You think of flowers in terms of gentleness, beauty and “goodness,” and yet every time a new bud opens there is a great thrust of joyful aggression that is hardly passive, and a daring and courage that reaches actively outward. Without aggression your body would be denied its growth, the cells within it caught in inertia. Aggressiveness is at the base of the magnificent bursting of creativity.

To some degree we will touch upon those dilemmas in this book. In your society and to some extent in others, the natural communication of aggression has broken down. You confuse violence with aggression, and do not understand aggression’s creative activity or its purpose as a method of communication to prevent violence.

Birth is an aggressive action — the thrust outward with great impetus of a self from within a body into a new environment. Any creative idea is aggressive. Violence is not aggressive. It is instead a passive surrender to emotion which is not understood or evaluated, only feared, and at the same time sought.

(9:12. Pause.) The nature of your personal beliefs in a large measure directs the kinds of emotions you will have at any given time. You will feel aggressive, happy, despairing, or determined according to events that happen to you, your beliefs about yourself in relation to them, and your ideas of who and what you are. You will not understand your emotions unless you know your beliefs. It will seem to you that you feel aggressive or upset without reason, or that your feelings sweep down upon you without cause if you do not learn to listen to the beliefs within your own conscious mind, for they generate their own emotions.

Birth is perhaps the most forceful aggression, in your terms, of which you are capable in your system of reality (emphatically). In the same way, the growth of any idea into temporal realization is the result of creative aggression. It is impossible to try to erase true aggressiveness. [...]

[...] Your problem then is not how to deal with normal aggressiveness, but how to handle it when it has remained unexpressed, ignored, and denied over a long period of time. [...] Here I simply want to point out the difference between healthy natural aggressiveness, and the explosive, distorted emergence of repressed aggression.

(Pause at 9:34.) Any attempt to impair the flow of true aggression results in a distortive, uneven, explosive pseudo-aggression that causes wars, individual neurosis, and a great many of your problems in all areas.

[...] Because you consider aggression synonymous with violence, you may not understand that aggressive — forceful, active, mental or spoken — commands for peace could save your life in such a case; yet they could.

[...] (See Chapter Six, and the 633rd session in Chapter Eight.) Augustus felt powerless, considering power in terms of aggression and violence, so he isolated that portion of himself from himself and projected it into a “second self.” [...] Because his basic concept held aggressiveness and power as one, however, then the strength to act automatically meant the strength to be aggressive. And here aggression was equated with violence.

[...] Both imply great action and vitality, and an aggressive thrust that has nothing to do with violence. Yet many people have physical symptoms or suffer unpleasant situations because they are afraid to utilize their own power of action, and equate power with aggression — meaning violence. [...]

(Pause.) Love is propelled by all of the elements of natural aggression, and it is powerful; yet because you have made such divisions between good and evil, love appears to be weak and violence strong. [...] The male in your society is taught to personify aggressiveness with all of those antisocial attitudes that he cannot normally demonstrate. [...]

(Long pause at 9:46.) The criminal element represents the individual’s own feared and unfaced aggressions. [...] The enforced incarceration of violent men often leads to a riot, and the private closeting of normal aggression often brings psychological rioting and outbursts of physical symptoms.

[...] Rather harmlessly, aggressive tendencies could also be given freedom. The individual involved would experience the aggressiveness, and yet he would hurt no one. Suggestions could even be given so that he learned to understand his own aggressiveness through watching himself in the dream state.

[...] The habitual, overly-aggressive or overly-dependent tendencies would not result in habitual aggressive or dependent behavior, for each individual action would be harmlessly expressed.

[...] When or if, for example, aggressiveness is the problem, then the preliminary suggestion should include a statement that in the dream the aggression will be harmlessly acted out (underline harmlessly), and not directed against a particular individual.

[...] This may seem like a double censure, but it is in all cases the intangible element, the aggressiveness itself, that is important, and not the person or persons toward whom the individual may decide to vent the aggressiveness.

Legitimate response, legitimate aggressive—(It is interesting to note that Jane stumbled over the word aggressive, even speaking as Seth)—response, is no problem, for there is no buildup behind it. [...] Often in such situations he will hurt himself because he has an exaggerated (underlined) idea of the hurt any normal aggressive reaction, from a frown to a verbal one, can have.

[...] If he lets go creatively he fears his aggressions will also be expressed spontaneously. But spontaneously released aggressions are not only natural but beneficial.

I explained earlier his exaggerated notion of aggression and also the reasons behind it. The smallest aggressive jerking of his mother’s bed could cause her pain, you see. [...]

Normal aggressive acts are like microscopic chunks of ash that barely fly very fast or far. It is only highly charged and repressed aggressive energy that turns into bombs.

[...] Ruburt should continue expressing his aggressive feelings—kicking as well as with the pillows and badminton. But this is leading him toward the beliefs behind the charged repressed aggressiveness, which is highly important.

[...] He has only to realize that he can, so help encourage him in aggressively going outward. [...]

You grew up in an environment, my dear friend, in which violence and aggressiveness became one, were expressed in some degree by both parents. [...] Your father’s aggressiveness, normal male aggressiveness, was blocked up, and directed against your mother. You longed to express your natural violence, you normal aggressiveness, and you also feared to do so, and dwelled mainly in your own world.

Usually his aggressive feelings are automatically sublimated into his work. [...]

[...] However he began his creative life very early as an outlet, you see, for aggressive and violent feelings. [...]

The child even then realized that violence and aggression was somehow connected with his mother’s illness. [...]

[...] Aggression becomes a method of survival. Since they believe so strongly in the power of others, and in their own relative powerlessness, they feel forced into aggressive actions almost as preventative measures against greater violence that will be done against them.

[...] This applies whether or not major crimes are committed; so the simple expression of aggression without understanding does not help.

In the case of criminals and their belief systems, aggression has a positive value. [...]

[...] She solid aggression. He saw aggression as strength. [...]

He was an extremely aggressive woman last time. [...]

He basically good, but hidden aggressions a danger. [...]

(“In what way are these aggressions a danger?”)

Joseph is now facing the fact of his own aggressions, as he never really did to any strong extent in the past. Consciously recalling the dreams is excellent, since the subconscious data is at least to some extent consciously assimilated, and in the dreams aggressive tendencies are indeed released and worked out in an actual manner, as satisfying to the subconscious as if they were worked out within the physical field. And to some extent through muscular action, even in dreams such aggressions find physical outlet also, and save you quite a few aches and pains, by the way.

Again, you Joseph feared aggression in the past so strongly that you would not allow yourself to even recall such dreams a year ago. Ruburt has no such knowledge of aggressive dreams, a very few, and this is also significant. [...]

[...] Lately the dreams have featured a lot of aggressive action on my part, and it had been my own idea also that this aggressiveness released was a good thing.

[...] No one is endeavoring to tamper with his personality, however, and it is his natural reaction to turn aggression, when it arises, outward in some manner, while he is almost superstitiously careful that it not be directed at another individual.

[...] The tension between the two leads him to temper aggressiveness with creativity, or to use aggressiveness creatively.

[...] In some cases new mothers may feel highly aggressive and nervous. These feelings are sometimes due to the fact that the male son causes an activation of the animus in her, with a resulting charge of aggressive feelings.

[...] The characteristics of the animus provide the aggressive thrust that returns the personality back outward into physical activities, triumphantly holding the products of creativity that the anima characteristics have secured.

(9:58.) Your reality exists in a particular area of activity in which aggressive qualities, thrusting-outward characteristics, are supremely necessary to prevent a falling back into the infinite possibilities from which you have only lately emerged. [...]

[...] However, aggressions can be turned into constructive terms if care is used. Aggressions should be, as soon as possible after their recognition, turned into constructions. If not, consciously you forget the aggression; the energy stores up until it explodes in what we will call an unsupervised construction.

[...] Physical activity is an excellent way of using and controlling the effect of aggressive reaction, and will prevent the buildup of aggressive emotions into unsupervised physical constructions, and also prevent the habitual piling up of such aggressions, where detrimental constructions result continually.

Aggressions are merely the result of energy not clearly directed, invalid survival patterns. If these aggressions are not handled with some degree of success, they will form themselves into expectations, where they will then let forth their power in the formation of unfortunate constructions.

[...] The aggressive feeling, unharnessed, would have caused difficulties at the gallery, and even in your personal relationship. His seeking out of his friend, your landlady, was beneficial, since in harmless talk and chatter much aggressive energy was harmlessly constructed.

The aggressive nature of symbols is little understood, nor the relationship between aggression and creativity. These are far from opposing characteristics, and without an aggressive thrust, symbols would lack their high mobility. [...]

It is both the creative and aggressive aspects of consciousness that allow it to use symbols, to move through various levels of experience, and the aggressive nature of thought that so propels it, despite your knowledge, into realities that you do not understand.

Aggressiveness and passivity are both behind symbols of birth, for both are needed. [...] Inertia results when aggressiveness and creativity are not in the proper proportions, when consciousness leans too severely in one direction or another, when the flow of symbols is either too quick or too slow for the particular psychological environment in which you dwell.

Natural aggression provides the charge for all creativity. Now reading this, many readers will be taken back, for they believe that love is the impetus, and that love is opposed to aggression. [...] Natural aggression is the creative loving thrust forward, the way in which love is activated, the fuel through whose agency love propels itself. (With emphasis:) Aggression in the most basic terms has nothing to do with physical violence as you think of it, but with the force through which love is perpetuated and creatively renewed.

The connections between creativity and aggression have never been understood in your society. A misunderstanding of true aggression can lead into a fear of all emotion, and cause you to cut yourself off from one of nature’s best therapies.

[...] Each has a basis in natural aggression.

[...] The family also uses the mother as a way of testing its own strength and unity, and as a method of channeling aggression. Often she picks up the aggression of the family, and then reacts for you all. You can then blame her without facing the fact of the underlying aggression.

[...] The mother has set up patterns of behavior that allow her to use aggressions in this way, and to dissipate the aggressions of others to a large degree. Within your family, no others save perhaps Stephen, could handle aggressions in this manner—that is, dissipate them. [...]

[...] You have the loyalty and unswerving support of the others, partially simply because their aggressions are channeled in an opposite direction and toward another family member. [...]

[...] The episode last evening was aggressively disrupting to some extent. [...]

[...] To argue aggressively that war is wrong is ironic stupidity, for such an individual already displays those characteristics that lead to war.

[...] The seemingly small episode of last evening presented in miniature the basic attitudes that are behind aggressive acts.

[...] The male’s aggressive tendencies, often taken as basic characteristics of the species itself, are a case in point. This is an exaggerated, learned aggressive response, not natural in those terms in your species, or as interpreted in any other species.

His rage turns outward as aggression. It is the highest idiocy, however, to project that artificial aggression outward upon the animal kingdom in general. [...]

This artificial aggressiveness has nothing to do either, basically, with the struggle for survival. [...]

[...] They are often attempts to rid the mass psyche of exploding, misdirected, poorly understood aggressions. As a physical organism tries to thrust out poisons that impede its health, so the mass psyche organism, symbolically speaking, attempts to rid itself of this now-poisonous overdeveloped aggression.

The consequences however for the nation and the world would be far more disastrous had these hates and aggressions not found these therapeutic, almost surgical, unfortunately necessary, outlets.

[...] The inner hate and aggression has not been recognized by the nation in the past. [...]

[...] The strength of the inner unrecognized hatred and aggression can be disastrous, and yet it works for the service of the ideal.

[...] The anima serves not only as a personal but as a mass-civilizing influence, mellowing strongly aggressive tendencies and serving also as a bridge both in communicating with women in a family relationship, and in communication also as it is applied through the arts and verbalization.

Again, however, this represents the male lives with which the self has been involved — the young boy, the priest, the aggressive “jungle man,” and the wise old man. [...]

[...] The anima or woman within will rouse him to make compensating actions, causing an upsurge of intuitive abilities, bringing a creative element to offset aggressiveness.

Ideally, left alone, these operations would result in a balance individually and en masse, where aggressiveness was always used creatively, as indeed it can and should be.

[...] It has to do with the real nature of aggression and passivity,¹ which you have allowed yourselves to forget … Birth is an aggressive experience. Passivity is based upon the joyful recognition of natural aggression. [...]