“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your friends and acquaintances will be concerned with the same problems, for you will draw to yourself those with the same concerns. I am telling you again, therefore, that many of your ideas of good and evil are highly distortive, and shadow all understanding you have of the nature of reality.

If you form a guilt in your mind, then it is a reality for you, and you must work it out. But many of you form guilts for which there is no adequate cause, and you saddle yourselves with these guilts without reason. In your dimension of activity there appear to be a wild assortment of evils. Let me tell you that he who hates an evil merely creates another one.

(9:45.) Now: From within your point of reference it is often difficult for you to perceive that all events work toward creativity, or to trust in the spontaneous creativity of your own natures. Within your system, to kill is obviously a moral crime, but to kill another in punishment only compounds the original error. Someone very well known who established a church — if you will, a civilization — once said, “Turn the other cheek if you are attacked.” The original meaning of that remark, however, should be understood. You should turn the other cheek because you realize that basically the attacker only attacks himself.

Those who do not take advantage of such opportunities in this life often do not do so when it is over. Consciousness will expand. It will create. It will turn itself inside out to do so. There is nothing outside of yourself that will force you to understand these issues or face them.

(10:28.) The simple fact is that as long as you believe in the concept of evil, it is a reality in your system, and you will always find it manifested. Your belief in it will, therefore, seem highly justified. If you carry this concept through succeeding generations, through reincarnations, then you add to its reality.

If you hate evil, then beware of your conception of the word. Hate is restrictive. It narrows down your perception. It is indeed a dark glass that shadows all of your experience. You will find more and more to hate, and bring the hated elements into your own experience.

They are, you see, the only true realities. They are the only real foundations of existence. It is foolish, as Ruburt once said, to hate a storm or shake your fists at it and call it names. You laugh if you think of children or natives in such activities. It is useless to personify a storm and treat it as a demon, focusing upon its destructive elements, or those elements that to you appear destructive.

Change of form is not destructive. The explosive energy of a storm is highly creative. Consciousness is not annihilated. A storm is part of creativity. You view it from your own perspective, and yet one individual will feel within the storm the unending cycle of creativity, and another will personify it as the work of the devil.

Through all your lives you will interpret the reality that you see in your own way, and that way will have its effect upon you, and in turn upon others. The man who literally hates, immediately sets himself up in this fashion: He prejudges the nature of reality according to his own limited understanding.

The most important idea to be remembered is that no one thrusts the experience of any given lifetime upon you. It is formed faithfully according to your own emotions and beliefs. (As Seth, Jane delivered this material vigorously, her pace rapid.) The great power and energy of love and creativity is apparent in the mere fact of your existence. This is the truth so often forgotten — that [the combination of] consciousness and existence continues and absorbs those elements that seem to you so destructive.

This does not mean that every one in your present acquaintanceship has been known to you, and it certainly does not imply a boring record played over and over again, for each encounter is a new one in its own way. Remembering what I said about families, realize also that towns and villages may also be composed of the past inhabitants of other such towns and villages, transposed with new experiences and backgrounds, as the group tries different experiments.

Some who wanted to travel from the Old World to the New, may be reborn in the new one. You must remember also that abilities from past lives are at your disposal for your present use. You reap your own rewards. Information concerning these is often given to you in the sleep state, and there is a kind of gestalt type of dream, a root dream, by which those who have known each other in past lives now communicate.

In each case the individual is the judge, not only of each succeeding life, its time, environment, and historical date, but also of its overall character and methods of accomplishment. There are as many different ways to reincarnate, therefore, as there are inner selves, and each inner self will choose its own characteristic methods.

Your own survival as a species was your main concern. You considered other species only in the light of their use to you. You did not have any true conception of the great sacredness of all consciousness, nor of your relationship within it. You were losing your grasp of that great truth.

In the present circumstances you are carrying that idea forward — of species survival regardless of the consequences, the idea of changing the environment to suit your own purposes; and this has led you to a disregard of spiritual truths.

In physical reality, therefore, you are seeing the results. Now those personalities who are returning are doing so for various reasons. Some of them are drawn to physical life again because of these attitudes. They are those who in the past, in your terms, strove for physical existence without consideration for the rights of other species. They are driven to return because of their own desires.

The species must learn the value of the individual man. The species is also learning its dependence upon other species, and beginning to comprehend its part in the whole framework in physical reality.

The crisis is a kind of therapy, however. It is a teaching method that you have set up for yourselves because you need it. And you need it now, before your species embarks upon journeys to other physical realities. You must learn your lessons now in your own backyard before you travel to other worlds. So you have brought this upon yourself for that purpose and you will learn. (End session at 11:55 P.M.)