“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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 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.

But the body has its own integrity, and illness is often simply a natural sign of imbalance, a physical message to which you are to listen and make inner adjustments accordingly.

When these realignments are always made from the outside, the body’s innate coherence becomes jeopardized, and its intimate relationship with mind confused. More, its natural healing powers are dulled. The built-in initiating triggers of reactions that are meant to follow inner stimuli are activated instead by “exterior” means.

(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.

In your terms, you are in a state of evolution as a species. Part of this experience includes a natural fascination with exterior events. You are developing properties of consciousness that are in their own way uniquely your own, as your environment is. A strong focus is a necessary counterpart, since you are involved in a learning process in which all elements inherent in the situation will be explored.

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.

As you understand the nature of natural hypnosis, you will no longer feel the need to generate new negative feelings. Your load of inhibitions will recede. As you trust yourself more you will naturally express your feelings, and their suppression will not bring about explosive reactions any more. They will come and go. The channel to power will be opened more clearly. Attention to your own stream of consciousness is highly important. This alone will help you see in what areas you are denying impulses or giving yourself directions that lead to powerlessness.

The point of power exercise is meant to familiarize you with your own energy and your ability to direct it. The natural hypnosis exercises (given in the last chapter) allows you greater effectiveness in directing and focusing that power.

(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.)