“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Now all of this can be applied to your relationships in your reincarnational existences, and of course it also is highly pertinent to your current daily experience. If you hate another person, that hate may bind you to him through as many lives as you allow the hate to consume you. You draw to yourself in this existence and in all others those qualities upon which you concentrate your attention. If you vividly concern yourself with the injustices you feel have been done you, then you attract more such experience, and if this goes on, then it will be mirrored in your next existence. It is true that in between lives there is “time” for understanding and contemplation.

I spoke earlier of rigid concepts of right and wrong. There is only one way to avoid this problem. Only true compassion and love will lead to an understanding of the nature of good, and only these qualities will serve to annihilate the erroneous and distortive concepts of evil.

Let me try to throw some light upon what I am trying to tell you. First of all, love always involves freedom. If a man says he loves you and yet denies you your freedom, then you often hate him. Yet because of his words you do not feel justified in the emotion. This sort of emotional tangle itself can lead to continued entanglements through various lives.

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.

Now: If, for example, you hate a parent, then it becomes quite easy to hate any parents, for in their faces you see and project the original offender. In subsequent lives you may also be drawn into a family and find yourself with the same emotions, for the emotions are the problem, and not those elements that seem to bring them about.

If you hate illness you may bring upon yourself a succeeding life of illness, because the hate has drawn it to you. If instead you feel….

Now: If you expand your sense of love, of health, and existence, then you are drawn in this life and in others toward those qualities; again, because they are those upon which you concentrate. A generation that hates war (Jane looked at Carl) will not bring peace. A generation that loves peace will bring peace.

In the next life you will be working with those attitudes that are now yours. If you insist upon harboring hatreds within you now, you are very likely to continue doing so. On the other hand, those sparks of truth, intuition, love, joy, creativity, and accomplishment gained now, will work for you then as they do now.

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.

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.

Now I am emphasizing the issue of hate in this chapter on reincarnation because its results can be so disastrous. A man who hates always believes himself justified. He never hates anything that he believes to be good. He thinks he is being just, therefore, in his hatred, but the hatred itself forms a very strong claim that will follow him throughout his lives, until he learns that only the hatred itself is the destroyer.

I would like to make it clear that there is nothing to be gained, either, by hating hatred. You fall into the same trap.

What is needed is a basic trust in the nature of vitality, and faith that all elements of experience are used for a greater good, whether or not you can perceive the way in which “evil” is transmuted into creativity. What you love will also be a part of your experience in this life and others.

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.

(Pause at 11:13.) Hate is powerful if you believe in it, and yet though you hate life, you will continue to exist. You have made appointments, each of you, that you have forgotten. They were signed, so to speak, before you were born in this existence. In many cases the friends that you make were close to you long before you met them in this present life.

The problem of war will sooner or later teach you that when you kill another man, basically you will end up killing yourself. The over-population problem will teach you that if you do not have a loving concern for the environment in which you dwell, it will no longer sustain you — you will not be worthy of it. You will not be destroying the planet, you see. You will not be destroying the birds or the flowers, or the grain or the animals. You will not be worthy of them, and they will be destroying you.