“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) What is usually forgotten is the real nature of aggressiveness, which in its truest sense simply means forceful action. This does not necessarily imply physical force, but instead the power of energy directed into a material action.

I sympathize with your predicament. The fact is that before being “assailed” by what may seem to be such terrifying unnatural ideas, you have already blocked off an endless variety of far less drastic ones, any of which you could have expressed quite safely and naturally in daily life. 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. Later in this book we will deal specifically with methods to that end. Here I simply want to point out the difference between healthy natural aggressiveness, and the explosive, distorted emergence of repressed aggression.

For now consider this blocked energy. Consciously, most people are already afraid of it — they did not repress it because they considered it good. When I use the word “repressed” I do not mean forgotten, or shoved into the unconscious, or beyond reach. You may pretend that such material is hidden but it is quite within your conscious awareness. You have only to honestly look for it and organize what you find.

It is very possible to “see” such information and not see it at the same time, simply because you do not add all of the data together. No one can make you do that, of course. To do it you must have a sense of courage and adventuresomeness; and tell yourself that you refuse to be cowed by ideas that after all belong to you, but are not you.

In your terms man is an animal, rising out of himself, from himself evolving certain animal capacities to their utmost; not forming new physical specializations of body any longer (again in your terms), but creating from his needs, desires and blessed natural aggressiveness inner structures having to do with values, space and time. To varying degrees this same impetus resides throughout all creaturehood.

(The Mitzi episode in turn reminded me of a series of little poems Jane wrote a few years ago. Many people call them Haiku — the Japanese verse form — but they are only reminiscent of that category. We have several of them pinned up on our walls, among them this one:

At certain levels both cat and mouse understand the nature of the life energy they share, and are not — in those terms — jealous for their own individuality. This does not mean they will not struggle to live, but that they have a built-in unconscious sense of unity with nature in which they know they will not be lost or immersed (quietly intent).

(10:27. This had been one of Jane’s longer trances. It had been a deep one, too — yet she remembered hearing the thunder when I asked her about it. She was eager to have me read Seth’s material back to her, but then: “Oh, wait a minute… I’m already starting to get more, and I want to get up and move around first.” To give her a break, I went outside to look for our oldest cat, Willy. The younger one, Rooney, was in. Resume at 10:44.)

(Pause.) If you think you are guilty because you read one kind of book or another, or entertain certain thoughts, then you run particular risks. If you believe something is wrong then in your experience it will be, and you will consider it negative. So you will collect an “unnatural” guilt, one that you do not deserve but accept and so create.

If its built-in instincts are left alone the body is basically self-regulating. It does not kill off all red blood cells if there are too many of them at a given time. It has better sense. But in your fear of negative thoughts you often attempt to deny all normal aggressiveness, and at the first glimpse of it bring up your mental antibodies prepared for action. In so doing you try to repudiate the validity of your own experience. If you do not feel your individual reality, then you can never realize that you form it, and so can change it. It is this denial of experience, and the energy blockages involved, that build up the accumulation of unnecessary “unnatural” guilt. The body itself cannot understand these blocked messages, and cries out to express its own corporeal knowledge of the moment as it experiences it. (Intently:) You mentally shout in such situations that you do not feel what you feel.

On ten justified occasions you may have felt like telling someone to leave you alone, but refrained, not wanting to hurt their feelings; afraid that you would be rude even though the occasion was one where your remark might well have been understood and taken calmly. Because you did not accept your feelings, much less express them, on the next occasion you might explode seemingly without reason and initiate a spectacular argument, completely unjustified.

Demons of any kind are the result of your beliefs. They are born from a belief in “unnatural” guilt. You may personify them. You may even meet them in your experience, but if so they are still the product of your immeasurable creativity, though formed by your guilt and your belief in it.

This obviously does not mean that the time of the body’s death would not come. It does mean that the seasons of the body would be understood as following those of the mind, ever-changing and flowing, with conditions coming and going but always maintaining the splendid unity within the body’s form. You would not have chronic illnesses. Generally speaking, and ideally, the body would wear out gradually while still showing far greater endurance than it does now.

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.

An outright lie may or may not be a violation. A sex act may or may not be a violation. A scientific expedition may or may not be a violation. Not going to church on Sunday is not a violation. Having normal aggressive thoughts is not a violation. Doing violence to your body, or another’s, is a violation. Doing violence to the spirit of another is a violation — but again, because you are conscious beings the interpretations are yours. Swearing is not a violation. If you believe that it is then in your mind it becomes one.

Not at all. You could counter such an attack in several ways that do not involve killing. You would not be in such a hypothetical situation to begin with unless violent thoughts of your own, faced or unfaced, had attracted it to you. But once it is a fact, and according to the circumstances, many methods could be used. 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.

(Long pause at 12:11, eyes closed.) If you cut your finger it bleeds. In so doing the blood clears away any poisons that may have entered. The bleeding is beneficial and the body knows when to stop it. If the flow continued it would be wrong or detrimental in your terms, but the body would not think the blood was bad because it continued its course of action. It would not attempt to cut off all blood, considering it evil. It would instead make whatever adjustments were necessary to bring the emission to a natural halt.

As an accumulation would occur in the flesh, so the same thing might happen in your mental experience. Physically you could end up with a very serious condition; and mentally and emotionally such a clamping down on natural forces can result in “diseased” idea structures that are isolated from other more healthy concepts. These can be like growths — not lacking oxygen, for example, but free access and flow with other portions of your conscious experience.

(End at 12:25 a.m. “Wow,” Jane said when she was out of another excellent trance. “I’m tired now but Seth’s still got plenty left….”)