“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It may seem that nations behave only too impulsively, that for example the just-released American hostages were kidnapped as a result of highly impulsive behavior. In fact, that event might only seem to prove that impulsive behavior is basically aggressive, undependable, and chaotic. As a matter of fact, the students took such regrettable actions not because they gave into impulsive behavior, but because the road to true impulsive expression had been blocked so long that such actions became one of the few possible ways of giving vent to certain expressions. When you are a hostage you cannot express your own impulses, of course. Your free will is highly curtailed for all practical purposes. It is curtailed because the number of impulses are so drastically reduced by circumstance.

Whenever, and for whatever reasons you block the normally free flow of impulses, you also curtail the exercise of free will, for free will involves you in the experience of choosing between the actualization of one impulse or another. The captors then cut down on the freedom of the hostages by reducing the number of impulses to which the hostages could respond. This is all so clear that it is difficult to express step by step. The telling itself makes the affair seem complex—but whether or not you are dealing with private behavior, with the treatment of one person in regard to his or her own impulses, or whether you are dealing with a mass event of political nature, involving the enforced blockage of impulses on the part of one group toward another, you are necessarily cutting down on the exercise of free will.