“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“No, I’m okay.” Seth-Jane’s pace was rather slow.)

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.

(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….

(The weather has been exceptionally warm for days. A light rain had started at session time, and now there was lightning, followed by thunder resounding across the city.)

(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.)

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.

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.

(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.

(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….”)