“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Both prisoners and officials, however, take it for granted that most of those now behind bars will return time and time again. The confined project their personal problems out upon the society. Society returns the “favor.” In the same way individuals often think of certain characteristics as animal or evil, and attempt to isolate those portions from other areas of their own activity. Power or the lack of it, and the attitudes surrounding either mode, are often involved.

Remember Augustus, in the case mentioned earlier in this book. (See Chapter Six, and the 633rd session in Chapter Eight.) Augustus felt powerless, considering power in terms of aggression and violence, so he isolated that portion of himself from himself and projected it into a “second self.” Only when this second self became operative could he display any power. Because his basic concept held aggressiveness and power as one, however, then the strength to act automatically meant the strength to be aggressive. And here aggression was equated with violence.

As a society you may project it upon the criminal, as a nation upon a foreign country. As an individual you may place this power upon an employer, a labor union, or any other segment of society. In whatever area you choose, though, you will feel relatively weak in comparison with the strength that you have projected outward. You meet your own denied power, you see, whenever you find yourself in a situation where you feel weak in comparison to another person or situation that frightens you.

There are many subsidiary beliefs connected to these convictions. They can all work in such a way that you deny yourself the use of your abilities — and this in turn causes you to project them outward upon others.

You must then project wisdom onto others and reject it in yourself, or be faced with a dilemma in personal values.

The voodoo and the healer, the witch doctor and the priest, are all held in honor, yet are also looked upon with a certain terror because of the power and knowledge involved. The man who heals or the man who curses both imply a power of knowledge to many individuals. To those who are caught up with fundamental ideas in pious terms, religious power is a frightening thing. Normal aggression, seen as evil, is therefore segregated within the self — and also seen everywhere outside. Period.

The use of your private energy brings you into intimate relationship with your own source of power. Healing involves great natural aggressive thrusts of energy, growth, and the focus of vitality. The more powerless you feel, the less able you are to utilize your own healing abilities. You are then forced to project these outward upon a physician, a healer, or any outside agency. If your own belief in the physician “works” and you are cured of symptoms, you are physically relieved, and yet your own belief in yourself may be further infringed upon. If you are making no effective efforts to handle your own problems, then the symptoms will simply reappear in a new fashion, and the same process will be reinitiated. You may lose faith in your doctor while still retaining confidence in doctors as a whole, and run from one to another.

The individual’s faith is transferred more and more to an outside agency. This usually means that no time is allowed for necessary inner dialogues of self questioning, and the self-healing that might otherwise occur is brought about through belief in another. This can only go on for so long, however.

The point of power, again, is in the present, when your nonphysical self merges with corporeal reality. The recognition of that fact alone can revitalize your life.

Throughout this venture however you are, in the dream state, always kept in touch with the realities from which your physical experience springs. As you understand time, you will eventually be able to merge your inner comprehension with your physical self, and form your world on a conscious basis. Such manuscripts as mine are meant to help you do precisely that.

The more involved you become with complicated physical organisms, the more energy you project outward and the more entranced you become with “exterior” manifestations. In itself this was — and is — a natural learning method. Your inner life is being translated into corporeal reality. As you perceive it and relate to it, you begin to question first its origin and then its meaning.

(11:35.) Your social structure, from the largest metropolis to the smallest farm, from the wealthiest areas to the poorest ghettos, from the monasteries to the prisons, reflects the inner situation of the individual self and the personal beliefs that each of you hold.