1 result for (book:nopr AND session:634 AND stemmed:terrifi)
[... 8 paragraphs ...]
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.
[... 11 paragraphs ...]
(As Seth-Jane delivered this material, my mind flashed back many years to a summer day when I was about eleven years old. With my two brothers I sat in the back yard of the house in which we grew up, in a small town not far from Elmira. Our next-door neighbor’s cat, Mitzi, had caught a field mouse. She played with it in the grass; with conflicting feelings I watched Mitzi, of whom I was very fond, block off each attempt of the terrified mouse to escape — until finally, having had her sport, she ate it….
[... 13 paragraphs ...]
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.
[... 31 paragraphs ...]