“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

(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.

(She told me that Seth would soon be going into the effects of our beliefs upon our environment, explaining how our racial mental climate is responsible for our exteriorized “weather.” He plans to use local aspects of the great flood of June, 1972, as the focal point for his material because we’d had personal experience with that disaster here in Elmira. [See the notes for the 613th session in Chapter One.] Seth, Jane added, would say that as a species we’ve grown used to thinking of ourselves as being outside of nature — so much so that we’ve forgotten we’re really part of it.)