“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The conscious mind is meant to align all of your capabilities in accordance with its beliefs about the nature of reality. Those resources are considerable, for they include the deepest aspects of your creativity, and powers far beneath consciousness of which you are only dimly aware.

To some degree we will touch upon those dilemmas in this book. In your society and to some extent in others, the natural communication of aggression has broken down. You confuse violence with aggression, and do not understand aggression’s creative activity or its purpose as a method of communication to prevent violence.

Birth is an aggressive action — the thrust outward with great impetus of a self from within a body into a new environment. Any creative idea is aggressive. Violence is not aggressive. It is instead a passive surrender to emotion which is not understood or evaluated, only feared, and at the same time sought.

Violence is basically an overwhelming surrender, and in all violence there is a great degree of suicidal emotion, the antithesis of creativity. (Pause.) Both killer and victim in a war, for instance, are caught up in the same kind of passion, but the passion is not aggressive. It is its opposite — the desire for destruction.

Know that yearning is made up of feelings of despair caused by a sense of powerlessness, not of power. Aggressiveness leads to action, to creativity and to life. It does not lead to destruction, violence or annihilation.

There are many biological signs shown by the body, all meant as communications to others on a creative basis — as warnings to whatever degree. Each is automatic in its own way, and yet ritualistic, a dance of muscle in motion with its own meaning, and biologically understood. These are all constructive. They are meant to elicit reactions from others and to arrive at new points of understanding, a balance of rights. When your conscious thoughts interfere with such processes, you are in deep trouble.

(Pause.) Sometimes you think of suicide as ignominious and passive, but of war as aggressive and powerful. Both are equally the result of passivity and distorted aggression, and of natural pathways of communication not used or understood. You think of flowers in terms of gentleness, beauty and “goodness,” and yet every time a new bud opens there is a great thrust of joyful aggression that is hardly passive, and a daring and courage that reaches actively outward. Without aggression your body would be denied its growth, the cells within it caught in inertia. Aggressiveness is at the base of the magnificent bursting of creativity.