“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.

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.

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.

(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:

(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.

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.

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.