“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Dictation: Each individual will have a slightly different definition for “negative” emotions. One person may find sexually stimulating thoughts delightful and a most enjoyable kind of diversion. Another may consider them impure, bad, unhealthy, or otherwise disadvantageous.

Normal aggressiveness flows with strong patterns of energy, giving motive power to all of your thoughts whether you consciously regard them as positive or negative, good or bad. (Very definitely:) The same thrusting creative surge brings them all forth. When you consider a thought good you usually do not question it. You allow it its life and follow through. Usually if you regard a thought as bad or beneath you, or if you are ashamed of it, then you try to deny it, stop its motion and hold it back. You cannot restrain energy, although you may think you can. You simply collect it, whereupon it grows, seeking its fulfillment.

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.

Such a task meant that man must break out of the self-regulating, precise, safe and yet limiting aspects of instinct. The birth of a conscious mind, as you think of it, meant that the species took upon itself free will. Built-in procedures that had beautifully sufficed could now be superseded. They became suggestions instead of rules.

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.

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.

(Long pause.) You are to preserve life consciously, then, as the animals preserve it unconsciously.

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.

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.

Over a period of time the conscious mind, because of its position, can override the body’s messages. Yet the backed-up accumulation of energy will seek outlet. The smallest, most innocent symbol for the repressed material may then bring about behavior on your part that seems out of all proportion to the stimulus.

There are many other conditions, though, all having to do with your conscious beliefs. You may think it is better to die quickly of a heart attack, for example. Your individual purposes are not the same so you will manage your body experiences in a great variety of ways.

Generally speaking, you are here to expand your consciousness, to learn the ways of creativity as directed through conscious thought. The aware mind can change its beliefs, and so to a large extent it can alter its bodily experience….

The animals do not need such a message, of course, nor can it be literally translated, for your consciousness is flexible and leeway had to be left for your own interpretation.

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.

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.