“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.

Violence, in your level, is the other face of creativity, but you do not realize it and it is you who have set up the separation. All life, in certain respects, involves what you call violence. Breath is a violence, it is simply where you draw the line. All living is a thrusting out toward, and joyful thrusting out toward, the energy that you have not learned, as yet, to use creatively, you call violence. It has great potentials for creativity, and it is up to you now to learn how to use it creatively for it is another face of creativity.

This does not mean I am saying kill, kill, kill. You do not understand the holy and sacred nature of life or energy and that you cannot misuse it. You may think you misuse it, but you are not allowed to misuse it. You are not allowed to destroy. While you live with these things you must deal with them and bear their consequences. If you kill, and believe that you kill, you will bear those consequences at this level of your development, but to think that you can destroy a consciousness would make the gods laugh. You cannot destroy one flower seed, much less a man.

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.

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.

Animals consume one another, and in that consumption also, and at their level, there is again the innate knowledge of a sacrament, and animals understand this among themselves. You, however, eat indiscriminately with no thought of the living animal that you consume. Now as you consume the animals so one day will your physical body return to the earth and help form other animals. And portions of the atoms, themselves, that compose your body will run across the fields in Iowa a hundred years from now, changed and altered, but remembering their backgrounds.