“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Some individuals can with ease and exuberance imagine themselves in a fistfight, a brawl, unmercifully beating “the devil” out of an adversary. The same thoughts may fill another man with intense terror and grave feelings of guilt. This same man, however, who would not purposely entertain fantasies of such nature under normal conditions, may in time of war imagine himself killing the enemy with the greatest feelings of holy joy and righteousness.

Now: It is often said that man believes in devils because he believes in gods. The fact is that man began to believe in demons when he started to feel a sense of guilt. The guilt itself arose with the birth of compassion.

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.

The hunter, freed more or less from animal courtesy, would be forced to emotionally identify with his prey. To kill is to be killed. The balance of life sustains all. He must learn on a conscious level then what he knew all along. This is the intrinsic and only real meaning of guilt and its natural framework.

Now: The interpretations and uses to which this quite natural guilt has been put are horrendous.

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.

(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.

You will not usually form a creation of it of which you are proud. If you believe firmly in poor health you may use this repressed energy to attack a physical organ — a gall bladder may become “bad.” According to your own belief system, you may trust the integrity of your body and instead project this guilt out upon others — onto a personal enemy, or a particular race, creed or color.

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.

(11:10.) In this case the other person has no idea as to why you reacted in such a fashion, and is deeply hurt. And your guilt grows. The trouble is that ideas of right and wrong are intimately involved with your chemistry, and you cannot separate your moral values from your body.

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.

If you shed the distorted concepts of unnatural guilt and accepted the wise ancient wisdom of natural guilt instead, there would be no wars. You would not kill each other mindlessly. You would understand the living integrity of each organ in your body and have no need to attack any of them.

Natural guilt then is the species’ manifestation of the animals’ unconscious corporeal sense of justice and integrity. It means: Thou shalt not kill more than is needed for thy physical sustenance. Period.