“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You cannot kill. As long as you can extinguish a human consciousness forever, then murder and killing are crimes. And you must deal with them. As long as you believe in the reality of violence, then violence is a crime, and you reap its fruits. There will never be a justification for killing or violence.

Not in your physical time, but within the next hundred years, that time may come... (phrase omitted)... but when it comes, and if it comes soon it will come as a miracle. For it will come when every man realizes that killing is wrong, and when every young man in every country refuses to go to war, and when he refuses to curse any man or any flower. You do not defend any idea with violence. With violence you kill an idea.

If there is one message I would give to you all, it is that there is no justification for killing—there is no justification for hatred—there is no justification for violence. It may occur, but those who indulge in violence are themselves changed, and the purity of their purpose adulterated. They are no longer the selves that they were.

[...] You cannot kill a chicken, personally now, and eat it comfortably. You certainly cannot kill a cow by yourselves. Indirectly, however, you know that the slaughterhouses are cruel—that animals are not killed quickly or cleanly, and to some extent the psychic disquiet of those animals is consumed with their meat. Animals killed quickly and cleanly make better food.

[...] The hunter is naturally equipped to kill in such and such a manner. The prey is most easily killed by such maneuvers.

Despite all of your knowledge about the animals, it has not really been suspected that the natural hunter-animal kills most mercifully. [...]

[...] The development of tools gave man options in the way and manner of killing his prey.

[...] It is good because it is something you can understand practically: “Thou shalt not kill.” [...] Under most conditions you know when you have killed. [...] The idea is that if you love your neighbor you will not treat him poorly, much less kill him — but the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill,” says you shall not kill your neighbor no matter how you feel about him. So let us say in a new commandment: “Thou shalt not kill even in the pursuit of your ideals.”²

[...] It would mean that you did not kill animals in experiments, taking their lives in order to protect the sacredness of human life. That would be a prime directive: “Thou shalt not kill even in the pursuit of your ideals” — for man has killed for the sake of his ideals as much as he has ever killed for greed, or lust, or even the pursuit of power on its own merits.

You are a fanatic if you consider (underlined) possible killing for the pursuit of your ideal. [...]

[...] Seth repeated several times that for civilized man to kill is wrong. An animal in the jungle killing for food is one thing. To kill for the sake of killing is another. When a wild animal kills, the killed is replaced in the natural scheme of things. [...] When man kills he rips out a part of himself that he has created. Man will stop killing when he realizes this, and that death is not an ending but a change of form.

(Speaking of the fact that civilized man should not kill, Seth said the whole idea of killing is fallacious to begin with: an enemy who is “dead” is far more harmful than one who is still alive. [...] Killing is not thought of as an end in itself on other planes, he repeated. But it is wrong to kill on our plane when we do consider it an end.

[...] Seth talked a good deal on the cooperation of all living things in maintaining our universe, and of how it’s so very wrong for civilized human beings to kill. [...]

[...] Killing is not one of them however, nor are wars.

[...] To kill is to be killed. [...]

(12:01.) Killing another human being is a violation. Killing while protecting your own body from death at the hands of another through immediate contact is a violation. [...]

[...] This same man, however, who would not purposely entertain fantasies of such nature under normal conditions, may in time of war imagine himself killing the enemy with the greatest feelings of holy joy and righteousness.

This will lead you to say, “Supposing I feel like killing my boss, then, or putting poison in my husband’s tea; or worse, hanging my five children on the clothesline instead of the towels? [...]

This does not mean I am saying kill, kill, kill. [...] If you kill, and believe that you kill, you will bear those consequences at this level of your development, but to think that you can destroy a consciousness would make the gods laugh. [...]

[...] They then killed and ate the wise elders. Both as a method of ending their lives, in a quiet manner, for they killed them easily when they were too old to run from jungle animals or from hunters or from warriors from other tribes. They killed them mercifully, and then they ate them so that the wisdom could become a part of the brave and so that, in one way, immortality could be achieved, in that the elders would then feel that they were a part of the tribe and part of the flesh and blood of the tribe. [...]

([Garrett:] “Should people get a pleasure out of killing, like people do for a sport, instead of killing for food?”)

(After a discussion of probabilities, Ned related his dream of killing the fish.)

To kill for nothing more serious than convenience or to kill for the sake of killing involves rather dire consequences on your plane, and the emotion or emotional value behind such killing is often as important as what is killed. That is the lust for killing is also a matter that brings dire consequences regardless of, in many cases, the particular living thing or things that is killed. [...]

[...] That is although in one way the birds that were killed were meeting a natural end, the reason behind this end was wrong in terms of emotional value and he sensed this. It goes without saying that a bird’s death is inevitable, but a cat killing a bird does not have to juggle the same sort of values with which man is concerned.

[...] Suffice it to say that to kill for self-protection or even to kill a natural prey on your plane does not involve you in what we may call for the first time, I believe, karmic consequences.

(“Why was Jane so upset about the killing of the starlings at the art gallery by the police over the weekend? [...]

To kill for convenience … or for the sake of killing involves rather dire consequences, and the emotional value behind such killing is often as important as what is killed. That is, the lust [for] killing is also a matter that brings dire consequences, regardless of the particular living thing that is killed. [...]

[...] Go, go, go.
Why not have a band play and give balloons away?
There’s nothing like killing birds
To clean up the business section.
We could feature a Starling Day, for our centennial celebration,
Such elation as the city fathers
And other pot-bellied elders
Did their best to keep the city clean.
We could give ice cream away to the kids who killed the most,
The hosts of observers could yell the cheer:
“Oh, it takes such courage and it takes such brawn
To drop the blackbirds on the County House lawn.”

[...] … It goes without saying that a bird’s death is inevitable, but a cat killing a bird does not have to juggle the same sort of values with which a man must be concerned. For now, suffice it to say that to kill for self-protection or food on your plane does not involve you in what we may call for the first time, I believe, karmic consequences.

[...] I’d written two poems on the idea, and the day after the starlings were killed, I did another:

Killing except for self-protection will be paid for. The idea of killing is what is at fault. If you agree with the killing of birds for example, you wind up with the killing of men. [...]

[...] Again, this does not involve punishment in any sense of the word, but the idea of killing permissiveness is not discriminating. Once you allow yourselves to kill you will kill any living thing. [...]

[...] You had to learn that basically to hate is to kill. [...]

(“How about our killing animals for food?”)

[...] As long as you believe that a bullet can kill a man, then it behooves you not to kill.

When you realize that a bullet cannot kill a man, then you will not need to kill. [...]

[...] I cannot kill, for there is only life, and life cannot be killed.

Now, dear friends, there is never any justification for war, and there is never any justification for killing.

[...] The last paragraph of material may give clues to human behavior today: Man kills animals — and eats them — for reasons he’s consciously forgotten. His killing today would be based on at least intuitive understanding…. One wonders whether the same reasoning might apply when man kills man….)

(Long pause.) In ways most difficult to explain, man “absorbed” an animal’s spirit before he killed it, so that the spirit of the animal merged with his own. [...]

The father (a Mr. Moore, killed at age 47) had other difficulties. [...] The older woman (an aunt, killed at age 77) also wanted a quick death. [...]

[...] It’s attached to this session as page 302 and describes what seems to be in ordinary terms a senseless and horrendous story: A 20-year-old drunken driver crashed head-on into another auto, killing two people, the father and an aunt, and putting the other five passengers, all members of the same family, into the hospital. [...]

[...] The children were not to be killed, for example, and in some near encounters in the past, their deaths would have been involved.

[...] He wanted to die, but also in an indirect fashion, in that he could not consciously shoot himself, while he could kill himself in an event that seemed to be accidental.

When you kill a man, most of you believe that you have killed him forever. [...]

[...] The man who killed him believes he has killed a man, and ended consciousness forever and blotted out for eternity something that existed for a very brief time. [...]

[...] Conscious killing beyond the needs of sustenance is a violation.

[...] Thus the hatred of one generation of adults whose parents were killed in a war helps generate the next one.

There is hardly anything mysterious in the idea that life can kill. [...]

[...] When a man kills another, regardless of his other beliefs a certain portion of his conscious mind is always aware of the violation involved, justify it though he may.

([Joel:] “Who killed the first human being?”

[...] Perhaps by the time you got there I had already killed my husband.”

([Jane:] “She also took the first shot at you guys, but that didn’t mean much because you were going to kill them anyway.”

[...] He who kills must learn what killing is by being the victim. [...]

[...] But as long as you believe that you kill a man and that you kill him forever, then you must work out that problem. [...]

[...] You cannot kill another man, you cannot kill another woman and be free. [...]

[...] Many were killed upon his word. [...]

(Pause at 10:25.) But he took a nationalistic glory in killing his enemies. [...]

[...] At break she got a series of images of the first ruler, bloodthirsty and joyous as he killed, she said. [...]

[...] He had enormous vitality, bounding about, killing with a joyful childlike innocence, if you can put it that way. [...]

[...] “Cowboys and Indians” was our gang’s favorite game back in Sayre in the late 1920s, and as we roamed the nearby fields all of us made believe we killed our enemies and/or were killed ourselves. [...]

Children play at getting killed. [...]

[...] When Jane called him the lawyer told Jane that his client was a 27-year-old schizophrenic who’d confessed to killing a certain woman he’d met in a Seth class both attended some years ago. [...] Jane didn’t ask for details on the case, but instead explained to the lawyer something of Seth’s ideas so that the attorney could use that material in his defense, making it clear that above all Seth was not for violence, even though the prosecuting attorney was evidently trying to make the defendant sound as though it was okay to kill because reincarnation was a fact: Since we all lived other lives, no one could really kill anyone. [...]

Your child, in a past life, this child was an uncle and in an accident you killed him. [...]

For various reasons, and because you did not understand, you held it against yourself that once you accidentally killed him, and then when he was a child you gave him away. [...]