“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To that extent natural guilt projected man into the future. This is of course a learning process, natural within the time system that the species adopted. Unfortunately, artificial guilt takes on the same attributes, utilizing both memory and projection. Wars are self-perpetuating because they combine both natural and unnatural guilt, compounded and reinforced by memory. Conscious killing beyond the needs of sustenance is a violation.

Natural guilt is also highly connected with memory, and arose hand in hand with mankind’s excursion into the experience of past, present and future. Natural guilt was meant as a preventive measure. It needed the existence of a sophisticated memory system in which new situations and experiences could be judged against recalled ones, and evaluations made in an in-between moment of reflection.

(Long pause at 9:56.) So controls were needed lest the conscious mind, denied full use of the animals’ innate taboos, run away with itself. Guilt, natural guilt, depends upon memory then.

I have used the phrase “moment of reflection” several times because it is another attribute peculiar to the conscious mind and, again in your terms, is largely denied to the rest of creaturehood. Without that pause — in which man can remember past in the present, and envisage a future — natural guilt would have no meaning. Man would not be able to recall past acts, judge them against the present situation, or imagine the future sense of guilt that might result.

Guilt is the other side of compassion. [...] Guilt in that respect therefore has a strong natural basis, and when it is perverted, misused or misunderstood, it has that great terrifying energy of any runaway basic phenomenon.

If you shed the distorted concepts of unnatural guilt and accepted the wise ancient wisdom of natural guilt instead, there would be no wars. [...]

[...] This is the intrinsic and only real meaning of guilt and its natural framework.

Now: The interpretations and uses to which this quite natural guilt has been put are horrendous.

The simplicity of natural guilt does not lead to what you think of as conscience, yet conscience is also dependent upon that moment of reflection that in a large measure sets you apart from the animals. [...] Conscience arose with the emergence of artificial guilt. [...]

Now: Artificial guilt is still highly creative in its way, an offshoot made in man’s image as his conscious mind began to consider and play upon the natural innocent guilt that originally implied no punishment.

[...] Yet natural grace and natural guilt are given you, and these will also grow more fully into conscious awareness. [...]

[...] You are most likely involved with artificial guilt. Even if a violation occurred, natural guilt does not involve penance. [...]

[...] The evil animal was the natural predator, for example. It would help here if the reader remembers what has been said about natural guilt earlier in this book. [...]

All such dogmas use artificial guilt, and natural guilt is distorted to serve those ends. [...]

In terms of simple biological function, you now had a species no longer completely dependent upon instinct, yet still with all the natural built-in desires for survival, and the appearance within it of a mind able to make decisions and distinctions.

It was only natural that certain experiences would seem better than others, but the species’ new abilities made it necessary that sharp distinctions be made. [...]

[...] That question, often asked unconsciously — if not consciously — brings you back to beliefs in punishment that have nothing to do with the concept of natural guilt, but with those distortions placed upon it. [...]

Remember that ideas are as natural as the weather. [...] As you come into your body with all of its physical surroundings, so at birth do you emerge into a rich natural psychological environment in which beliefs and ideas are every bit as real.

In all such cases, however, blanket moral judgments are being applied that involve feelings of guilt in which individual experience is forgotten.

[...] None of this has anything to do with natural guilt, as described in Personal Reality. Now man does feel a certain amount of natural guilt when he loses his identification with nature, for that identification leads to intuitive connections with nature’s greater source.

You have disapproved of yourself, thinking yourself not spontaneous, and so your belief has often hampered your natural spontaneity, so that you struggled for notes because you thought you must; that was the kind of person you thought you were.

[...] As a rule these ideas represent your parents’ conceptions of natural guilt, distorted by their own beliefs. [...]

[...] Last night, we had reminders that a natural rhythmic cycle was completing itself six months later: As we retired I thought I heard the barking of geese migrating north, although Jane didn’t. I woke up around four a.m., though, and heard a flight clearly in the silent hour. [...]

[...] In a natural situation, this might involve a mass migration from one territory to another. [...]

[...] To some extent this was quite natural, for the new species developed in order to change the nature of its consciousness, to follow a reality in which instinct was no longer “blindly” followed, and to individualize in strong personal focus corporeal experience that had previously taken a different pattern.

3. Among others in The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book, see Chapter 9: Seth discusses the state of grace, natural guilt, artificial guilt, and related subjects.

Ruburt knew that Helper could be sent out to others, to their advantage, and in that regard the form stood for the great power of natural, positive desire and thought patterns. [...]