“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The guards are certain that the incarcerated are the dregs of the earth and must be held down at all costs. Both sides accept the concept of human aggression and violence as a method of survival. The prisoners’ energies are usually used in boring, innocuous tasks, even though some attempt is made to provide vocational training in many institutions.

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.

(9:24.) Now in its way that was a transference of a problem in a unique manner. The need to act and be in control of action is paramount in conscious beings. Augustus therefore actually created from himself a position of power from which he could, at least for a while, operate. He had to pretend amnesia so as to hide this mechanism from himself. As long as power is equated with violence, then you will feel it necessary to regulate normal aggression in your behavior; and considering power as violent, you will be afraid to act to some extent. You will then consider goodness and powerlessness to be somewhat synonymous, and equate power with evil. Not wanting to face such “evil” in yourself, you may then direct it outward and transfer it to another area.

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.)

Such feelings arouse artificial guilts. (Gesturing:) The individual who speaks out most loudly for the death penalty feels that he himself should really be condemned to death, to pay for the great aggression (violence) within him that he dares not express.

(Pause.) Love is propelled by all of the elements of natural aggression, and it is powerful; yet because you have made such divisions between good and evil, love appears to be weak and violence strong. This is reflected in many levels of your activities. The “devil” becomes a powerful evil figure, for example. (Emphatically:) Hate is seen as far more efficient than love. The male in your society is taught to personify aggressiveness with all of those antisocial attitudes that he cannot normally demonstrate. The criminal mind expresses these for him, hence the ambiguous attitudes on the part of society, in which renegades are often romanticized.

(Long pause at 9:46.) The criminal element represents the individual’s own feared and unfaced aggressions. These fears are closeted on an individual basis, and those people who express them socially are imprisoned. The enforced incarceration of violent men often leads to a riot, and the private closeting of normal aggression often brings psychological rioting and outbursts of physical symptoms.

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.

Natural aggression is simply the power to act.

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.