“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.

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.

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.

Viruses are alive, as I mentioned in another connection (in the 631st session in Chapter Seven), and can be beneficial or detrimental according to other balances in the body. In cancer cells the growth principle runs wild; within creaturehood each of the species has its place, and if one multiplies out of its proper order then all life and the body of the earth itself comes into peril.

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.

When women give birth in a crowded world they also know, and with a portion of their conscious minds, that a violation is involved. When your species sees that it is destroying other species and disrupting the natural balance, then it is consciously aware of its violation. When such natural guilt is not faced there are other mechanisms that must be employed. Again at the risk of repeating myself: Many of your problems result from the fact that you do not accept the responsibility of your own consciousness. It is meant to assess the reality that is unconsciously formed in direct replica of your thoughts and expectations.

When you do not embrace this conscious knowledge, but refuse it, you are not using one of the finest “tools” ever created by your species, and you are to a large extent denying your birthright and heritage.

(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.

(10:52.) The messages sent as a result are so highly contradictory that you are caught in a position where true instinct cannot reign, nor can reason prevail. Instead a distorted version of instinct results, along with a bastard use of sense as the species tries desperately to regulate its course.

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.