“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The dream served several purposes. It allowed him to release aggression in a much less violent manner than he would have in the past. It also, however, allowed him to see the picture of his own aggression as it existed on a subconscious level of his mind. The aggression that he feared was not so great and big and powerful and black and hairy and threatening as he thought. Instead, it was a part of himself and very small, fish size, you see, and easy to squash and kick. It was not this giant that you feared, and it was easy to rid yourself of this. Now, in this case, the fish was not a probable fish in another reality. It was a portion, however, of his own energy.

The meaning behind and the object lesson to be learned. Now, give us a moment. Each individual life, all life, has its own built-in mechanisms against danger.

Now, in the first place, there are several things you must understand. Some of these things you can misinterpret, and so I go lightly in class with them because some of you are not ready to understand them as yet. You hear the words and yet you do not understand what they really mean, but basically, you do violence to no one. Basically, you cannot hurt anything, but as long as you think that you can, then you must dwell within that reality. Now, in that reality, as you understand it now, there are reasons that you do not as yet perceive. I am not saying that you cannot perceive them, I am saying that you do not perceive them. No one, therefore, could hurt our friend’s fish, even if it were a live one, in your terms. And there are interconnections between you that you do not understand and that can be misinterpreted and these, also, I go lightly with in class and for the same reasons.

Therefore, no thing, in your terms, is hurt. However, in your frame of reference, no thing, in your terms, is hurt without giving acceptance to the hurt; without attracting it and without bringing it to itself, for within your frame of reference you form your own reality.

Now, not only human beings form their own reality, but all consciousness forms its own reality. Now, to fill out what I say, your own personal experience must come. You will understand what I say when the inner self is ready to understand, and I am not speaking in intellectual terms. The answers are within you and even when I speak those words that I have spoken many times, they are simply words until from within you comes the experience that gives them life.

([Arnold:] “We don’t really do violence against an identity or whole self, but only against a self-created camouflage system.”)

Indeed, it is a good analogy and different animals, you see, have taken different paths of evolution. All of those species, for example, that seem to have passed out of existence, within your level of reality, in other probabilities have continued to exist and develop. The dinosaurs have gone their way.

They do and they are different, for example, than they were here for they have continued their own line of development. Nothing is erased. In those terms, there is no nonexistence. That which is cannot not be.

The cannibals, in one way, were far more discerning, far more religious, and far more sacred in their attitude than many of you here in this room. They ate, for example, both human beings and animals, but they did not eat indiscriminately, nor did they eat without a knowledge of what they did. They realized that their life was a portion of all this life. They were at one level, and you are at another level. But at their level, and in their level of experience, they partook of the sacrament of life as they ate those things that they slayed. They gave thanks to the body that they consumed. They hastened the spirit that had been in the body on its way with thanks. They prayed that their hearts would be as strong and brave as the hearts that they devoured. Many of them, in their own environment, knew that those who were not eaten by them, for example other warriors, would die of hunger in any case. They ate them, therefore, also with thanksgiving and joy.

([Florence:] “They only ate enemies though, they never ate their own tribe.”)

If you will forgive me for the analogy, imagine that your present self is like a suit of clothing that you have put on, and when you are looking for the nature of reality, imagine that you take this suit of clothing off in the same way that a child discards its clothing before playing in the water in the springtime. The self that you put by will be there when you return, no one will steal it. Then let yourselves go and be joyful.