“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause at 9:56.) So controls were needed lest the conscious mind, denied full use of the animals’ innate taboos, run away with itself. Guilt, natural guilt, depends upon memory then.

Thou shalt not violate. Again, the injunction had to be flexible enough to cover any situations in which the conscious species could become involved. The animals’ instincts and their natural situations kept their numbers in bounds; and with unconscious, unknowing courtesy they made room for all others.

(Most intently:) When this happens, the species by default must fall back upon vestiges of old instincts — that were not geared to operate in conjunction with a conscious reasoning mind, and do not comprehend your experience; that finds your “moment of reflection” an impertinent denial of impulse. So man loses full use of the animals’ regulated, graceful instinct, and yet denies the conscious and emotional discrimination given him instead.

The same applies then to nations. Natural guilt is a creative mechanism, meant to serve as a conscious spur in the solving of problems that, in your terms, no other animals ever had. By taking advantage of it you leap still further through unknown frontiers, and break through into dimensions of awareness that were always latent since the birth of the conscious mind.

(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.