“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The simplicity of natural guilt does not lead to what you think of as conscience, yet conscience is also dependent upon that moment of reflection that in a large measure sets you apart from the animals. Conscience, as you think of it, is caused by a dilemma and a misunderstanding of the conditions set upon your physical existence. Conscience arose with the emergence of artificial guilt. Give us a moment…

The mind is also equipped to see its own beliefs, reflect upon them and evaluate their results, so using this tool as it was meant to be used would automatically help man in recognizing both his beliefs and their effects. Part of this great permissiveness has to do with the fact that man is to realize that he creates his own reality. Free will is a necessity. The leeway given allows him to materialize his ideas, meet them in physical experience, and evaluate for himself their particular kind of validity.

(Slowly:) I use these concepts, again, because of their familiarity to you. In the world of time they appear as real. We return once more to that moment of reflection, for it is here that both causes and effects first appear. Dimly, in your terms, it can be traced by observing the animals that even now roam the earth, for each in its own degree — far less than yours — shows that reflection. In some, for all intents and purposes, it does not exist at all. Yet it is there, latent.

Now: The greater your “period” of reflection, the greater the amount of time that seems to pass between events.

No one atom of air is like another. Each in its own way is aware and capable of entering into greater transformations and organizations, filled with infinite potential. As your breath leaves you and becomes part of the world, free, so do your lives leave you and continue to exist in your terms. You cannot confine a personality that you “were” to a particular century that is finished and deny it other fulfillments, for even now it exists and has fresh experience. As your moment of reflection gave birth to consciousness as you think of it — for both really came together — so then can another phenomenon and kind of reflection give birth to at least some dim conscious awareness of the vast dimensions of your own reality.