“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Any previous acts that had aroused feelings of natural guilt were to be avoided in the future. Because of the multitudinous courses open to the species, not only did the highly specific nature of many kinds of animalistic instinct no longer apply, but a curious balance had to be maintained. The conscious options that opened as man’s mental world enlarged made it impossible to allow sufficient freedom, and yet necessary control, on a biological level alone.

I have used the phrase “moment of reflection” several times because it is another attribute peculiar to the conscious mind and, again in your terms, is largely denied to the rest of creaturehood. Without that pause — in which man can remember past in the present, and envisage a future — natural guilt would have no meaning. Man would not be able to recall past acts, judge them against the present situation, or imagine the future sense of guilt that might result.

You may have two children, one of whom, generally speaking, behaves like Augustus One, and one who acts like Augustus Two. Because one seems so compliant and docile and one is so violent and unruly, you may never see the connections between their behavior, thinking them so obviously different. Yet if being “good,” polite, and compliant is not the usual state of normal children, neither is incessant violent activity. In such cases what you usually have is a situation in which one child is acting out unfaced aggressive behavior for the whole family. Such unreconciled patterns of activity also mean that love is not being freely expressed.

(11:30.) With animals, there are varying degrees of division between the self who acts and the action involved. With the birth of the conscious mind in man, however, the self who acts needed a way to judge its actions. Again we come to the importance of that period of reflection, in which the self, with the use of memory, glimpses its own past experience in the present and projects its results into the future.