“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.

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.

The detective and his criminal wear versions of the same mask. Following such ideas, you end up with segregations in which the ill, being powerless, are isolated; the criminals are kept together; and the old are held in institutions or in cultural ghettos with their own kind. Transferences of personal problems are all involved here, and clusters of beliefs.

Your own attitude about these issues will tell you much about yourself and influence your own personal reality.

If you equate power with youth then you will isolate the elderly, transferring upon them your own rejected powerlessness, and they will seem to be a threat to your well-being. If you agree that violence is power then you will punish the criminal with great vindictiveness, for you will see life as a power struggle, and will concentrate upon the acts of violence about which you read. This may bring such aspects into your personal life, so that you yourself meet with violence — hence deepening your conviction. (Pause.) If you accept the basic idea that evil is more powerful than good, then your beneficial acts will bear little fruit because of your own framework; you assign such small power of action to them.

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

(10:46.) Your beliefs then are highly important in the way in which you handle the power of personal action.

(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.

If you utilize the point of power properly (as described in the 657th session in Chapter Fifteen), you will feel the nonphysical energy translated into effective personal power through your intersection with flesh. You will be able to use that power consciously, with purpose, to change your personal experience, and so to change the social framework at least partially. Such exercises aid in the evolution of your consciousness, and will also serve you in fashions you may not suspect. The acquiescence to your own power will automatically flow through your experience, activating your dream life as well and providing additional helpful impetus to your waking reality. You will no longer need to transfer your sense of power to others. All of the exercises given earlier in this book are prerequisites, however; they are necessary so that you understand how the point of power is to be used. The recognition of personal feelings and the working through of beliefs — all of this will expand your understanding of yourself.

(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.)