“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Animals have a sense of justice that you do not understand, and built-in to that innocent sense of integrity there is a biological compassion, understood at the deepest cellular levels.

Compassion “rose” from the biological structure up to emotional reality. The “new” consciousness accepted its emerging triumph — freedom — and was faced with responsibility for action of a conscious level, and with the birth of guilt.

A cat playfully killing a mouse and eating it is not evil. It suffers no guilt. On biological levels both animals understand. The consciousness of the mouse, under the innate knowledge of impending pain, leaves its body. The cat uses the warm flesh. The mouse itself has been hunter as well as prey, and both understand the terms in ways that are very difficult to explain.

Man, pursuing his own way, chose to step outside of that framework — on a conscious level. The birth of compassion then took the place of the animals’ innate knowledge; the biological compassion turned into emotional realization.

Guilt is the other side of compassion. Its original purpose was to enable you to empathize on an aware level with yourselves and other members of creaturehood, so that you could consciously control what was previously handled on a biological level alone. Guilt in that respect therefore has a strong natural basis, and when it is perverted, misused or misunderstood, it has that great terrifying energy of any runaway basic phenomenon.

It has nothing to do with adultery or with sex. It does contain innate issues that apply to human beings, that would have no meaning for other animals in the framework of their experience. Strictly speaking, the translation from biological language to your own is as given in this session; but the finer discrimination reads thusly: Thou shalt not violate.