“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Many such philosophies make you cower at the idea of entertaining “negative” thoughts or emotions. In all cases the clues to your emotional experience and behavior lie in your systems of belief: some more evident to you than others, but all available to you consciously. If you believe that you are of little merit, inferior and filled with guilt, then you may react in several ways according to your personal background and the framework in which you accepted those beliefs. You may be terrified of aggressive feelings because [it seems] others so much more powerful than you could retaliate. If you believe that all such thoughts are wrong you will inhibit them and feel all the more guilty — which will generate aggressiveness against yourself and further deepen your sense of unworthiness.

Your emotions then may strike you as highly unpredictable, extremely powerful, and to be kept down at all costs. Such an attempt to strangle natural feeling is bound to take its toll, but it is the belief itself that is to blame, and not the emotions. Any of the conditions mentioned puts you out of touch with your inner sense of balance. The natural grace of your being becomes disturbed.

If it seems to you that the soul is degraded by its alliance with the flesh then you will not be able to enjoy your own sense of grace, for you will not consider it possible. Your beliefs will dictate your very interpretation of various kinds of emotions. Many people, for example, are convinced that anger is always negative. It can be the most arousing and therapeutic emotion under certain circumstances. You can then realize that you have cowered before contradictory beliefs for years, rise up in anger against them, and quite literally begin a new life of freedom. Normal aggressiveness is basically a natural kind of communication, particularly in social orders; a way of letting another person know that in your terms they have transgressed, and therefore a method of preventing violence — not of causing it.

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.

As a rule the animals have better sense. Your mind and your body, therefore, are quite equipped to handle aggression. Violence occurs only when the natural expression of aggression has been short-circuited. The sense of power felt during such episodes is the result of repressed energy suddenly released, but the individual is always at the mercy of that energy then — submerged within it, and passively carried with it.

Here, often, and for various reasons, you find a hidden and distorted sense of power that says, “I am so powerful that I could kill you with my thought, and yet I refuse to do so.” No one, and no one thought, is that powerful. If thoughts alone could kill, you would not have the overpopulation problem!