“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.

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 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.

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.