“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.

It does not carry with it any built-in connection with punishment as you think of it. Once more, it was meant as a preventive measure. Any violation against nature would bring about a feeling of guilt so that when a like situation was encountered in the future, man would, in that moment of reflection, not repeat the same action.

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.

To that extent natural guilt projected man into the future. This is of course a learning process, natural within the time system that the species adopted. Unfortunately, artificial guilt takes on the same attributes, utilizing both memory and projection. Wars are self-perpetuating because they combine both natural and unnatural guilt, compounded and reinforced by memory. Conscious killing beyond the needs of sustenance is a violation.

In those terms overpopulation is a violation. In the cases of both war and of overgrowth, the species has ignored its natural guilt. When a man kills another, regardless of his other beliefs a certain portion of his conscious mind is always aware of the violation involved, justify it though he may.

(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 “demons,” your projections, are then placed upon a national enemy, or the leader of another race; sometimes whole masses of population will project upon other large groups the images of their own unfaced frustrations. Even in Augustus you find the hero and the villain, separate and diversified. As a man can be so divided, so can a nation and a world. So can a species. And a brief break.

(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.