“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.

Now, the point that our friend over here (Sue) was trying to make earlier is related, to some extent, along these lines in that you can become so afraid of violence that you overemphasize its effect. And if you will excuse me, in so doing you are taking on the guise of the devil. It is the same thing you see, as projecting upon a hypothetical devil all kinds of powers of destruction. You can do the same thing without realizing it by projecting into the idea of violence, all powers, and then it seems to you that life itself has no ability to protect itself and that any stray thought of violence or disaster will immediately zoom home and that the recipient has no way to protect himself. If this were the case your race would not have lasted out one day.

There was a civilization, and I am writing this in my book and some of you know of it—a civilization, in your terms, in your dim past, in which a group of human beings tried to form a physical body that could not act violently and when violence was threatened the body automatically closed off from action. It could not, literally, act. These people thought then that violence would be wiped away from the face of the earth, and they hoped to begin a race of people that would not know violence. It would seem perhaps to you, that this was a highly idealistic race and that they grew in strength and beauty, but they were not facing the issues clearly, you see.

([Arnold:) “The thought of not being able to do anything violent, as these people were, lead me to think of the opossum, that play opossum when violence appears.” )

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.