“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.

[...] The fact is that man began to believe in demons when he started to feel a sense of guilt. The guilt itself arose with the birth of compassion.

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.

[...] They are born from a belief in “unnatural” guilt. [...] You may even meet them in your experience, but if so they are still the product of your immeasurable creativity, though formed by your guilt and your belief in it.

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

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.

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

[...] With your theories of guilt and punishment you often imagine that you are hampered in this existence by guilts collected in the last life — or worse, accumulated through the centuries.

Now, you were early given the idea that a portion of your personality was guilty and therefore you were relieved when you were told that there were methods whereby you could receive this guilt. You accepted, for example, the penances and so forth because as a child, given the idea of guilt, you wondered what punishment would befall you. [...]

[...] Now, if the guilt is severe enough, as unfortunately it often is, this pseudo-guilt, then the young adult will do almost anything to relieve it. [...]

[...] Guilt will not help you; it is only a hindrance. [...]

[...] Until you can honor and love yourselves you cannot honor nor love anything else or anyone else, and as long as you see yourselves as guilty, then you will see guilt in every other person you look at, and you will see evil in the nature of reality. [...]

Tomorrow for example let him without guilt let the day be used to putter in the bedroom, play with poetry, do what comes naturally without a sense of guilt.

[...] My main point was that by displacing the cause of their troubles outside themselves, the patient freed himself or herself of guilt and responsibility for their own welfare. [...]

Many times people at the point of desperation seize upon such ideas, and often they are valuable because they relieve people of hidden guilts; they are not “to blame” for their difficulties—but certain elements outside of their own selves are the culprits. [...]

[...] Just the relief from guilt feelings alone would result in an upsurge of bodily health and enthusiasm. [...]

[...] Again, in the terms of this discussion, many murderers are overwhelmed by a sense of guilt, and the murderous act pinpoints the reason for the guilt—so the victim pays the murderer by giving a clear-cut, unassailable reason for a monstrous guilt that was before formless, and even more frightening, since it seemed to have no particular base, but an overwhelming vitality.

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

[...] It would help here if the reader remembers what has been said about natural guilt earlier in this book. [...]

[...] The failure adds to the sense of guilt.

[...] And I tell you this: there is no guilt. And I tell you: there is no guilt. [...] You create the idea of guilt. And when you believe in guilt, then you create the penance in accordance to how strongly you believe in the guilt. [...]

Christ’s thesis was inserted into a Jewish tradition dealing deeply with guilt, and the new thesis was meant to temper that tradition, and to spread beyond it. Instead, while carrying the belief in man’s potential, Christianity smothered the thesis beneath a slag heap of old guilt. Guilt can be used to manipulate people, of course, and it is a fine tool in the hands of government, religion, science, or any large organization that wants to retain its power.

[...] Christ well knew that that statement was indeed true, but men who condemned themselves, who considered themselves sinners, would not know what to ask for, except punishment to relieve their guilt. [...]

The boy was filled with guilt, but a guilt that had no name, no label—a psychological guilt that was the result of his upbringing, and that perhaps involved the existence of a brother. [...]

[...] Jane and I talked about the feelings of guilt and blame that are fated to surround the survivors for the rest of their lives, particularly the teenage children and the drunk driver. [...]

[...] The accident gives him a specific event upon which to lay his guilt, but coming so close to death, his own instincts for life were rearoused, so that he is literally given a second chance.

[...] I am well aware that strong elements of your civilization are built upon ideas of guilt and punishment. Many of you are afraid that without a feeling of guilt there would be no inner discipline, and the world would run wild. It is running quite wild now — not despite your ideas of guilt and punishment, but largely because of them. [...]

[...] It may not be so obvious that many of your present actions are caused by a belief in guilt. [...]

[...] You may then try to discover what the charged event was, but in such a case your trouble is a belief in guilt itself.

[...] I replied that we’d better forget that and try to focus on the future — yet such guilt feelings could be playing a significant role in her daily life, and we should find out if this is so.

(My own pendulum sessions lately have told me that I was feeling my own guilt because I thought I should have helped her more in the past. [...]

[...] This generates more guilt of course.... [...]

[...] 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. [...]

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

([Gert:] “Jane says I am quite guilt-ridden. My question is, as I am able to find out what I am guilty about and I find that guilt, do I then project that into another probable self?”)

[...] Once you realize that your guilt has no basis then it can dissolve. [...] You are creating the guilt, and through understanding you can learn to dissolve it for it will simply vanish. [...]

The sexual schism begins when the male child is taught to identify exclusively with the father image, and the female child with the mother image — for here you have a guilt insidiously incorporated into the growth process.

[...] Under such conditions, feelings of guilt immediately begin to arise whenever such a child feels natural affiliations toward the other parent.

[...] Continuing guilt is generated because the child knows unerringly that its own reality transcends such simple orientation.

[...] Guilt was involved. [...]

[...] this all continues; I feel a twinge of guilt—Rob’s typing reminds me that I was to do my three hours—but this IS writing; cataloging body-mood changes; I want to sketch the men working—eyes, sinuses, ears and neck strongly “working.” [...]

(I described to Jane my recent use of the pendulum to study my guilt feelings about her having her symptoms and losing her teeth. [...] I explained in some detail my feelings of guilt because Jane has her troubles. [...]