“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Power does not basically imply superiority over. There is the power of love, for example, and the power to love. Both imply great action and vitality, and an aggressive thrust that has nothing to do with violence. Yet many people have physical symptoms or suffer unpleasant situations because they are afraid to utilize their own power of action, and equate power with aggression — meaning violence. (See the 634th session in Chapter Eight.)

Unknowingly, the sick often give up their power to act in a healthy manner to the physicians. The doctors accept this mandate since they share the same framework of belief, so the medical profession obviously needs patients as badly as the ill need the hospitals. Society as you know it, not understanding the nature of normal aggression, considers it violent. The prisons and law enforcement agencies need criminals in the same way that criminals need them, for they operate within the same system of belief. Each accepts violence as a method of behavior and survival. (Pause.) If you do not understand that you create your own reality, then you may assign all good results to a personified god, and need the existence of a devil to explain the undesirable reality. So churches as they now exist in Western society need a devil as well as a god.

If you accept the idea that knowledge is “bad,” for instance, then in line with that belief all of your efforts to learn will be futile, or bring you great discomfort. You will not trust any knowledge that comes easily for you will feel that you have to pay, do penance for the attainment of any wisdom. Fundamental interpretations of the Bible often lead to such conclusions, so that the pursuit of knowledge itself, which has a built-in biological impetus, becomes a taboo activity.

(10:59.) I am dealing here mainly with Western culture. In some other civilizations, and particularly in the past as you think of it, witch doctors operated within a context of nature accepted by all. The witch doctor, while initiating natural forces on behalf of his patient, who seemed momentarily unable to do so, was then returning the patient to the source of himself and reviving his own buried sense of power. That is the source of physical life, the sense of power and action. When a man or a woman feels powerless, as you think of it, he or she will die.

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.

Each of you must work from the point of your own reality. There is no other way. Period. If you feel filled with rage, then do not say, “I am filled with peace,” and expect results. You will only be blanketing your feelings and inhibiting your energy and power. If you are furious, then beat a pillow and experience the rage, but without violence to another. Work it through until you are physically exhausted. If you do this honestly the reasons for the fury will come to you, and they will often be quite obvious. You simply did not want to face them.