“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(9:50.) Psychologically, only a massive explosion can free them. They feel so powerless that this adds to their difficulties — so they try to liberate themselves by showing great power in terms of violence. Some such individuals, model sons, for example, who seldom even spoke back to their parents, were suddenly sent to war and given carte blanche to release all such feelings in combat; and I am referring particularly to the last two wars (the war in Korea, 1950–53, and the war in Vietnam, 1964–73), not the Second World War.

In these wars aggressions could be released and codes still followed. The individuals were faced, however, with the horror of their violently released, pent-up hatreds and aggressions. Seeing these bloody results, they became even more frightened, more awed by what they thought of as this terrible energy that sometimes seemed to drive them to kill.

(Pause at 9:59.) Give us a moment… This is not to be a chapter devoted to war. However, there are a few points that I do want to make. It is a sense of powerlessness that also causes nations to initiate wars. This has little to do with their “actual” world situation or with the power that others might assign to them, but to an overall sense of powerlessness — even, sometimes, regardless of world dominance.

In a way I am sorry that this is not the place to discuss the Second World War (1939–45), for it was also the result of a sense of powerlessness which then erupted into a mass blood bath on a grand scale. The same course was followed privately in the cases of such individuals as just mentioned.

Give us a moment… Without going into any detail, I simply want to point out that in the United States strong national efforts were made after World War II to divert the servicemen’s energies into other areas on their return home. Many who entered that war feeling powerless were given advantages after it was over — incentives, education, benefits they did not have before it. They were given the means to power in their own eyes. They were also accepted home as heroes, and while many certainly were disillusioned, in the whole framework of the country’s mood the veterans were welcomed.

(Pause at 10:11.) I am speaking generally now about the war under discussion, for there were certainly exceptions, yet most of the men involved in it learned something from their experiences. They turned against the idea of violence, and each in his own way recognized the personal psychological ambiguities of their feelings during combat.

They were told by politicians that it was to be the last war, and the irony is that most of those in uniform believed it. (I, Robert Butts, was one of the believers.) The lie did not become truth but it became more nearly so, for despite their failures the ex-servicemen managed to bring up children who would not go to war willingly, who would question its premise.

In an odd way this made it even more difficult for those who did go into the next two, less extensive wars, for the country was not behind either one. Any sense of powerlessness on the part of individual fighting men was given expression as before, this time in a more local blood bath, but the code itself had become shaky. This release was not as accepted as it had been before, even within the ranks. By the last war (in Vietnam), the country was as much against it as for it, and the men’s feelings of powerlessness were reinforced after it was over. This is the reason for the incidents of violence on the part of returning servicemen.¹

(10:35. Jane’s trance had been deep on a very humid night. She now told me that while delivering the World War II data for the book, she had been quite aware of another, unspoken, channel from Seth.

(That one had been concerned exclusively with the Second World War, Jane said with some surprise, and had contained amazingly complete information on the war’s origins and the individual, racial, and reincarnational aspects of it as experienced by the peoples of various nations, whether or not said nations had been directly involved in it. The information had even considered the consequences flowing from the intensified use of technology by the societies of the world after the war. “All of that was coming from that way,” Jane pointed to her lower left. She spent perhaps ten minutes describing some of the categories inherent in the material, and repeatedly said that she wished we had a record of it. At the same time, although the data was available, we didn’t want to lay this book aside to get it.

You become conditioned so that you feel guilty when you even contemplate hating another. You try to hide such thoughts from yourself. You may succeed so well that you literally do not know what you are feeling on a conscious level. The emotions are there, but they are invisible to you because you are afraid to look. To that extent you are divorced from your own reality and disconnected from your own feelings of love. These denied emotional states may be projected outward upon others — an enemy in a war, a neighbor. Even if you find yourself hating the symbolic enemy, you will also be aware of a deep attraction.