“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It seems to you that you have, perhaps, but one chance as a species to solve your problems, or be destroyed by your own aggression, by your own lack of understanding and spirituality. As you are given many lives in which to develop and fulfill your abilities, so has the species in those terms been allotted more than the single line of historical development with which you are presently acquainted. The reincarnational structure is but one facet in the whole picture of probabilities. In it you have literally as much time as you need, to develop those potentials that you must develop, before leaving the reincarnational existences. Groups of people in various cycles of reincarnational activity have met crisis after crisis, have come to your point of physical development and either gone beyond it, or destroyed their particular civilization.

They were particularly concerned in the beginning with developing a human being who would have built-in safeguards against violence. With them, the desire for peace was almost what you would call an instinct. There were changes in the physical mechanism. When the mind signaled strong aggression, the body would not react. Now psychologically you can see vestiges of this in certain individuals, who will faint, or even attack their own physical system, before allowing themselves to do what they think of as violence to another.

The energy, often in your time given over to violence, went instead into other pursuits, but began to turn against them. They were not learning to deal with violence or aggression. They were attempting to short-circuit it physically, and this they found had complications.

The physical alteration was a strain on the entire system. The creative function and basis that has been distorted into the idea of aggression — the urge to act — was not understood. In a manner of speaking, breathing itself is a violence. The built-in inhibition resulted in a tied-up system of mutual controls in which the necessary thrusting-out of action became literally impossible.

These people, as remnants, really, of the first great civilization, always carried within themselves strong subconscious memories of their origin. I am speaking of the Lumanians now. This accounted for their quick rise, technologically speaking. But because their purpose was so single-minded — the avoidance of violence — rather, say, than the constructive peaceful development of creative potential, their experience was highly one-sided. They were driven by such a fear of violence that they dared not allow the physical system freedom even to express it.

(10:33.) The vitality of the civilization was therefore weak — not because violence did not exist, but because freedom of energy and expression was automatically blocked along specific lines, and from outside physically. They well understood the evils of violence in earthly terms, but they would have denied the individual’s right to learn this his own way, and thus prevented the individual from using his own methods, creatively, to turn the violence into constructive areas. Free will in this respect was discarded.