Chapter 8: Health, Good and Bad Thoughts, and the Birth of “Demons”
Session 633, January 17, 1973, 9:14 PM Wednesday
Good evening.
(“Good evening, Seth.”)
Now: We will begin with a letter.
Dear Friend:
I appreciate your interest in my work and sessions. I also am aware of your quite natural and human need to translate philosophy into daily life and action.
The ideas however are tools given to you for your use, in your own way. The more often you use these mental implements, the more proficient you become in developing and fulfilling your own unique gifts. There are those in your wold to whom you can turn for help, often – friends, confidants, or doctors, psychologists and psychics. According to “where you are”, any of these persons may be of assistance.
While such help may be welcomed, the kind of value I offer is of a different nature. In larger terms one of my most important messages is simply this: “You are a multidimensional personality, and within you lies all the knowledge about yourself, your challenges and problems, that you will ever need to know. Others can help you in their own way, and at certain levels of development such help is necessary and good. But my mission is to remind you of the incredible power within your own being, and to encourage you to recognize and use it.”
To this end, through Ruburt, I am producing the continuing body of the Seth material, and books, each in a different way geared to these goals. In my present book, The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book, I am including techniques that will allow you and thousands of others to use these ideas in normal daily living, to enrich the life that you know and to help you understand and solve your problems.
While it may not seem so at the present, the greatest gift I can give you is to reaffirm the integrity of your own being. I say this also because I am aware of your present status even as other portions of your own entity are.
Ruburt has only so much time available, and much must be taken into consideration. I am personally aware of your letter. Ruburt cannot answer all mail personally, however, or his work and mine could suffer. I am composing this note therefore to let you know that I hold you in my mind, and that energy is automatically sent out to you when your letter is received, and when this reply is sent. The energy will help release your own understanding and healing abilities, or help you in whatever particular area help is required.
Such energy is always available, whether you write to me or not. Such energy is constantly at your own command. If you believe me, then you will realize that others at best can only act as intermediaries, middlemen, and are in that respect not needed, for the energy is always available in your life. I simply give you that which is your own. - Seth
(“Thank you.”)
Now give us a moment; and that is the end of our letter. Some people you will want to send it to, and some you will not. Others you can take care of yourselves.
Dictation: Try a simple experiment. The results will be self explanatory. Think of a sad event from your life. Similar feelings will soon follow, and with them memories of other such unpleasant episodes strung together through association. Scenes, odors, words, perhaps half-forgotten, will suddenly come upon you with new freshness.
Your thoughts will activate the appropriate feelings. Beneath your awareness, however, they will also trigger the cells' ever-present memory imprints of stimuli received when those events occurred. There is, to some extent now, a cellular memory playback – and on the part of the entire body, the recognition of its state at that time.
If you pursue such sorrowful thoughts persistently you are reactivating that body condition. Think of one of the most pleasant events that ever happened to you and the reverse will be true, but the process is the same. This time the associated memories are pleasant, and the body changes accordingly.
Remember these mental associations are living things. They are formations of energy assembled into invisible structures, through processes quite as valid and complicated as the organization of any group of cells. Comparing them with cells, they are of briefer duration, generally speaking, though under certain conditions this does not apply. But your thoughts form structures as real as the cells. Their composition is different in that no solidity is involved in your terms.
As living cells have a structure, react to stimuli and organize according to their own classification, so do thoughts. Thoughts thrive on association. They magnetically attract others like themselves, and like some strange microscopic animals they repel their “enemies”, or other thoughts that are threatening to their own survival.
Using this analogy, your mental and emotional life forms a framework composed of such structures, and these act directly upon the cells of your physical body.
Now let us return to Augustus; for here we find again in one individual an excellent example of the way in which seemingly non-physical thoughts and beliefs can affect and alter the corporeal image.
First of all, Augustus had been told in various ways, quote: “You think too much. You should be doing something physical, involved in sports, more outgoing.” Such repeated remarks, with other childhood conditions, made him afraid of his own mental activity. He also felt unworthy, so how could his thoughts be good?
Feelings of violence accumulated early, but in his family there were no acceptable ways of releasing normal aggressive feelings. When these built up into felt, violent eruptions, Augustus was only the more convinced of his unacceptable nature. For some time in his normal state as a teenager, he tried harder and harder to be “good”. This meant the banishing of thoughts or impulses that were sexually inspired along various lines, aggressive, or even just unconventional. Considerable energy was used to inhabit these portions of his inner experience. The denied mental events did not disappear, however. They increased in intensity and were kept apart from his “safer” usual thoughts.
In such a way, Augustus actually created a mental structure whose organization followed the principles I mentioned before. Under other circumstances and possessing different characteristics, another individual could damage a physical organ by literally attacking it, as surely as it might be assaulted by a virus (emphatically). Because of Augustus's particular temperament and nature, however, and his native though conventionally underdeveloped creativity, he formed a structure rather than destroying one.
In his normal state he accepted only the beliefs he considered were expected of him. As mentioned (in the 628th session in Chapter Six), there was a time before his condition developed when his “good-self thoughts” and his “bad-self thoughts” vied for his attention, and the body tried desperately to react to constant, alternating and often contradictory concepts.
What developed was a situation in which the conflicting sets of thoughts and feelings finally took turns, though Augustus maintained his own integrity for most of the time. But those beliefs that he shoved away were, by attraction, instantly seized by the other mental structure – again, composed of ideas and feelings combined into what you might think of as an invisible cellular organization, with all capabilities of reaction.
In his normal condition Augustus thought of his own powerlessness – for he had denied himself normal aggressive action – and felt this weak. The beliefs activated the body's cellular memory, weakening the body and impeding its function. Yet for a time, while performance was dulled it was steady. A balance was maintained that suited his purposes.
He became afraid that the body would go out of control and commit violent actions, because he was of course aware of the strength of the denied thoughts and feelings. When a crisis situation arose or when he became lost in despair, an acceleration began that he pretended not to notice, and Augustus Two would appear.
Augustus Two was filled with a sense of power – because Augustus considered power wrong and set it aside from what he thought of as his normal self. Yet Augustus knew the body needed the vitality that he had denied it. Therefore enter Augustus Two with his great ideas of extraordinary power, vigor and superiority – and with fantasies of exceptional heroism and the memories of all of those denied by Augustus himself.
Aggressive action conveniently forgotten by Augustus was now recalled with exuberant glee by Augustus Two. As a result the chemical nature of the body was instantly revitalized. Muscular tone was greatly improved. There were changes in the amount of sugar in the blood and an alteration in the flow of energy throughout the body.
I knew when Ruburt interviewed Augustus that the young man identified Augustus Two with the left side of himself. In his normal state that side of the body contained more tension than the right.
In Augustus Two, the tension found release and the energy flow became more even after initial bursts of activity. The longer Augustus Two stayed, however, the weaker his position became – a fact recognized by Augustus and Augustus Two. Augustus, you see, had to build up sufficient repressed thought and emotion because of a situation with which he could not cope. This threat would then bring about the emergence of Augustus Two. The body behaves as you think it must behave, so Augustus and Augustus Two, with their alternating patterns of behavior, caused the body to react in quite different ways.
Forget now that in this case such a division occurred, and imagine instead the successive thoughts and feelings that you possess. When you feel weak you are weak. When you feel joyful your body benefits and becomes stronger. Augustus's case simply shows in exaggerated form the effects of your beliefs upon your physical image. If you think, “Aha, then from now on I will only think good thoughts – and therefore be healthy, and inhibit my 'bad' thoughts, or do anything at all with them but think them,” then in your own way you are doing what Augustus did. He began by believing that some of his thoughts were so evil that they must somehow be made non-existent. So inhibiting what you consider negative thoughts, or assuming that they are so terrible, is no answer.
The chapter is to be called, “Health, Good and Bad Thoughts, and the Birth of Demons”.
Now: Your beliefs about what is desirable and what is not, what is good and what is evil, cannot be divorced from the condition of your body. Your own ideas of values can help you achieve good health or bring about disease, can bring into your experience success or failure, happiness or sadness. Yet each of you will interpret that last remark in line with your own value system. You will have definite ideas about what success or failure means, or what good or evil is.
Your own value system then is built up of your beliefs about reality, and those beliefs form your experience. Suppose you believe that to be “good” you must try to be perfect. You may have been told, or read, that the spirit is perfect, and hence thought that your duty was to reproduce that perfect spirit in flesh as best you could. To this end you attempt to deny all imperfect thoughts and emotions. Your own “negative” thoughts appall you. You may believe also what I have told you – that your thoughts create your reality – so you become all the more frightened at mental or actual expressions of an aggressive nature. You may be so concerned about hurting someone else that you hardly dare move. Trying to be perfect all the time can be far more than a nuisance: It can be disastrous because of your misunderstanding.
The word “perfect” holds many pitfalls. In the first place it presupposes something completed and done beyond change, and so beyond motion, further development, or creativity.
The spirit is always in a state of becoming, ever-changing, supple, and in your terms without end, as it was and is without a point of beginning. Ruburt said recently that if he was sure of one thing about physical reality, it was [that is was] not anywhere near perfect in these terms. But in the same meaning of the word neither is the spirit, which to fulfill the requirement of perfection would have to be set in some state of completion beyond which no fulfillment or creativity was possible.
Your thoughts are. You may approve or disapprove of them, in the way that you think of a storm, for example. Left alone, your thoughts are as various, magnificent, trivial, frightening, or glorious as a hurricane, a flower, a flood, a toad, a raindrop or the fog. Your thoughts are perfectly themselves. Left alone, they come and go.
You with your conscious mind are to discriminate among those thoughts as to which ones you want to form into your system of beliefs (intently), but in so doing you are not to pretend blindness. You may at times which that a rainy day were a sunny one, but you do not stand at the window and deny that the rain is falling, or that the air is cold and the sky dark.
Because you accept the rain as a present reality does not mean, either, that you must believe that all days are stormy, and make that obvious misconception a part of your beliefs about reality. So you do not have to pretend that a “dark” thought doesn't exist. You do not have to take it as fact that all of your thoughts would be murky, left alone, and try to hide them.
Some people are afraid of snakes, even of the most harmless variety, and blind to their beauty and place in the universe. Some are afraid of certain thoughts, and so are oblivious to their beauty and their place in mental life.
Since you have all kinds of thoughts there are reasons for having them, as you have all kinds of geography. Within your reality it is as foolish to deny the existence of certain thoughts as it would be, say, to pretend that deserts do not exist. In following such a course you deny dimensions of experience and diminish your reality. This does not mean that you have to collect what you think of as negative thoughts, any more than it means that you should spend a month in a desert if you do not like them. Period. It does mean that within nature as you understand it, nothing is meaningless or to be pretended out of existence.
That will do. Now you may end the session...
Session 634, January 22, 1973, 9:19 PM Monday
Now: Dictation: Each individual will have a slightly different definition for “negative” emotions. One person may find sexually stimulating thoughts delightful and a most enjoyable kind of diversion. Another may consider them impure, bad, unhealthy, or otherwise disadvantageous.
Some individuals can with ease and exuberance imagine themselves in a fist-fight, a brawl, unmercifully beating “the devil” out of an adversary. The same thoughts may fill another man with intense terror and grave feelings of guilt. 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.
What is usually forgotten is the real nature of aggressiveness, which in its truest sense simply means forceful action. This does not necessarily imply physical force, but instead the power of energy directed into a material action.
Birth is perhaps the most forceful aggression, in your terms, of which you are capable in your system of reality (emphatically). In the same way, the growth of any idea into temporal realization is the result of creative aggression. It is impossible to try to erase true aggressiveness. To do so would obliterate life as you know it.
Any attempt to impair the flow of true aggression results in a distorted, uneven, explosive pseudo-aggression that causes wars, individual neurosis, and a great many of your problems in all areas.
Normal aggressiveness flows with strong patterns of energy, giving motive power to all of your thoughts, whether you consciously regard them as positive or negative, good or bad. The same thrusting creative surge brings them all forth. When you consider a thought good you usually do not question it. You allow it its life and follow through. Usually if you regard a thought as bad or beneath you, or if you are ashamed of it, then you try to deny it, stop its motion and hold it back. You cannot restrain energy, although you may think you can. You simply collect it, whereupon it grows, seeking its fulfillment.
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? Are you saying that I should merely follow through?”
I sympathize with your predicament. The fact is that before being “assailed” by what may seem to be such terrifying unnatural ideas, you have already blocked off an endless variety of far less drastic ones, any of which you could have expressed quite safely and naturally in daily life. Your problem then is not how to deal with normal aggressiveness, but how to handle it when it has remained unexpressed, ignored, and denied over a long period of time. Later in this book we will deal specifically with methods to that end. Here I simply want to point out the difference between healthy natural aggressiveness, and the explosive, distorted emergence of repressed aggression.
You will each have to discover for yourself those areas in which you strongly repress your thoughts, for many energy blockages will be found there. All of this will be covered in the later section.
For now consider this blocked energy. Consciously, most people are already afraid of it – they did not repress it because they considered it good. When I use the word “repressed” I do not mean forgotten, or shoved into the unconscious, or beyond reach. You may pretend that such material is hidden but it is quite within your conscious awareness. You have only to honestly look for it and organize what you find.
It is very possible to “see” such information and not see it at the same time, simply because you do not add all of the data together. No one can make you do that, of course. To do it you must have a sense of courage and adventuresomeness; and tell yourself that you refuse to be cowed by ideas that after all belong to you, but are not you.
Now: It is often said that man believes in devils because he believes in gods. 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.
Animals have a sense of justice that you do not understand, and built-in to that innocent sense of integrity there is a biological compassion, understood at the deepest cellular levels.
In your terms man is an animal, rising out of himself, from himself evolving certain animal capacities to their utmost; not forming new physical specializations of body any longer (again in your terms), but creating from his needs, desires and blessed natural aggressiveness inner structures having to do with values, space and time. To varying degrees this same impetus resides throughout all creature-hood.
Such a task meant that man must break out of the self-regulating, precise, safe and yet limiting aspects of instinct. The birth of a conscious mind, as you think of it, meant that the species took upon itself free will. Built-in procedures that had beautifully sufficed could now be superseded. They became suggestions instead of rules.
Compassion “rose” from the biological structure up to emotional reality. The “new” consciousness accepted its emerging triumph – freedom – and was faced with responsibility for action of a conscious level, and with the birth of guilt.
A cat playfully killing a mouse and eating it is not evil. It suffers no guilt. On biological levels both animals understand. The consciousness of the mouse, under the innate knowledge of impending pain, leaves its body. The cat uses the warm flesh. The mouse itself has been hunter as well as prey, and both understand the terms in ways that are very difficult to explain.
At certain levels both cat and mouse understand the nature of the life energy they share, and are not – in those terms – jealous for their own individuality. This does not mean they will not struggle to live, but that they have a built-in unconscious sense of unity with nature in which they know they will not be lost or immersed.
Man, pursuing his own way, chose to step outside of that framework – on a conscious level. The birth of compassion then took the place of the animals' innate knowledge; the biological compassion turned into emotional realization.
The hunter, freed more or less from animal courtesy, would be forced to emotionally identity with his prey. To kill is to be killed. The balance of life sustains all. He must learn on a conscious level then what he knew all along. This is the intrinsic and only real meaning of guilt and its natural framework.
You are to preserve life consciously, then, as the animals preserve it unconsciously.
Now: The interpretations and uses to which this quite natural guilt has been put are horrendous.
Guilt is the other side of compassion. Its original purpose was to enable you to empathize on an aware level with yourselves and other members of creature-hood, so that you could consciously control what was previously handled on a biological level alone. 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 think you are guilty because you read one kind of book or another, or entertain certain thoughts, then you run particular risks. If you believe something is wrong then in your experience it will be, and you will consider it negative. So you will collect an “unnatural” guilt, one that you do not deserve but accept and so create.
You will not usually form a creation of it of which you are proud. If you believe firmly in poor health you may use this repressed energy to attack a physical organ – a gall bladder may become “bad”. According to your own belief system, you may trust the integrity of your body and instead project this guilt out upon others – onto a personal enemy, or a particular race, creed or color.
If you are religious-minded and fundamental in your beliefs, you may blame a devil who causes you to behave in such and such a manner. As the body creates antibodies to regulate itself, so you will set up mental and emotional “antibodies”, certain thoughts that are “good”, to protect you from the fantasies or ideas that you consider bad.
If its built-in instincts are left alone the body is basically self-regulating. It does not kill off all red blood cells if there are too many of them at a given time. It has better sense. But in your fear of negative thoughts you often attempt to deny all normal aggressiveness, and at the first glimpse of it bring up your mental antibodies prepared for action. In so doing you try to repudiate the validity of your own experience. If you do not feel your individual reality, then you can never realize that you form it, and so can change it. It is this denial of experience, and the energy blockages involved, that build up the accumulation of unnecessary “unnatural” guilt. The body itself cannot understand these blocked messages, and cries out to express its own corporeal knowledge of the moment as it experiences it. You mentally shout in such situations that you do not feel what you feel.
Over a period of time the conscious mind, because of its position, can override the body's messages. Yet the backed-up accumulation of energy will seek outlet. The smallest, most innocent symbol for the repressed material may then bring about behavior on your part that seems out of all proportion to the stimulus.
On ten justified occasions you may have felt like telling someone to leave you alone, but refrained, not wanting to hurt their feelings; afraid that you would be rude even though the occasion was one where your remark might well have been understood and taken calmly. Because you did not accept your feelings, much less express them, on the next occasion you might explode seemingly without reason and initiate a spectacular argument, completely unjustified.
In this case the other person has no idea as to why you reacted in such a fashion, and is deeply hurt. And your guilt grows. The trouble is that ideas of right and wrong are intimately involved with your chemistry, and you cannot separate your moral values from your body.
When yo believe that you are good, your body functions well. I am sure that many of you will say, “I try constantly to be good, yet I am in miserable health, so how can that be?” If you examine your own beliefs the answer will be apparent: You try to be so good precisely because you believe you are so bad and unworthy.
Demons of any kind are the result of your beliefs. They are born from a belief in “unnatural” guilt. You may personify them. 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. You would not kill each other mindlessly. You would understand the living integrity of each organ in your body and have no need to attack any of them.
This obviously does not mean that the time of the body's death would not come. It does mean that the seasons of the body would be understood as following those of the mind, ever-changing and flowing, with conditions coming and going but always maintaining the splendid unity within the body's form. You should not have chronic illnesses. Generally speaking, and ideally, the body would wear out gradually while still showing far greater endurance than it does now.
There are many other conditions, thought, all having to do with your conscious beliefs. You may think it is better to die quickly of a heart attack, for example. Your individual purposes are not the same so you will manage your body experiences in a great variety of ways.
Generally speaking, you are here to expand your consciousness, to learn the ways of creativity as directed through conscious thought. The aware mind can change its beliefs, and so to a large extent it can alter its bodily experience...
Natural guilt then is the species' manifestation of the animals' unconscious corporeal sense of justice and integrity. It means: Thou shalt not kill more than is needed for thy physical sustenance. Period.
It has nothing to do with adultery or with sex. It does contain innate issues that apply to human beings, that would have no meaning for other animals in the framework of their experience. Strictly speaking, the translation from biological language to your own is as given in this session; but the finer discrimination reads thusly: Thou shalt not violate.
The animals do not need such a message, of course, nor can it be literally translated, for your consciousness is flexible and leeway had to be left for your own interpretation.
An outright lie may or may not be a violation. A sex act may or may not be a violation. A scientific expedition may or may not be a violation. Not going to church on Sunday is not a violation. Having normal aggressive thoughts is not a violation. Doing violence to your body, or another's is a violation. Doing violence to the spirit of another is a violation – but again, because you are conscious beings the interpretations are yours. Swearing is not a violation. If you believe that it is then in your mind it becomes one.
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. Whether or not any justification seems apparent, the violation exists.
Because you believe that physical self-defense is the only way to counter such a situation then you will say, “If I am attacked by another person, are you telling me that I cannot aggressively counter his obvious intent to destroy me?”
Not at all. You could counter such an attack in several ways that do not involve killing. You would not be in such a hypothetical situation to begin with unless violent thoughts of your own, faced or un-faced, had attracted it to you. But once it is a fact, and according to the circumstances, many methods could be sued. Because you consider aggression synonymous with violence, you may not understand that aggressive – forceful, active, mental or spoken – commands for peace could save your life in such a case; yet they could.
Usually there are a variety of physical actions, not involving killing, that would suffice. As long as you believe that violence must be met with violence you court it and its consequences. On individual terms, your own body and mind become the battleground, as does the physical body of the earth in mass terms. Your material form is alive through natural aggression, the poised, forceful and directed action that is the carrier for creativity.
If you cut your finger it bleeds. In so doing the blood clears away any poisons that may have entered. The bleeding is beneficial and the body knows when to stop it. If the flow continued it would be wrong or detrimental in your terms, but the body would not think the blood was bad because it continued its course of action. It would not attempt to cut off all blood, considering it evil. It would instead make whatever adjustments were necessary to bring the emission to a natural halt.
When you consider aggressive thoughts wrong, using this analogy, you do not even begin to allow the system to clear itself. Instead you shut up the “poisons” inside.
As an accumulation would occur in the flesh, so the same thing might happen in your mental experience. Physically you could end up with a very serious condition; and mentally and emotionally such a clamping down on natural forces can result in “diseased” idea structures that are isolated from other more healthy concepts. These can be like growths – not lacking oxygen, for example, but free access and flow with other portions of your conscious experience.
We will now end the session. My heartiest regards to you both, and a fond good evening.
(“Thank you very much, Seth. Good night.”)
Session 635, January 24, 1973, 9:44 PM Wednesday
Good evening.
(“Good evening, Seth.”)
Dictation: Now: (smiling) You do not need to put in my first now's.
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.
Any previous acts that had aroused feelings of natural guilt were to be avoided in the future. Because of the multitudinous courses open to the species, not only did the highly specific nature of many kinds of animalistic instinct no longer apply, but a curious balance had to be maintained. The conscious options that opened as man's mental world enlarged made it impossible to allow sufficient freedom, and yet necessary control, on a biological level alone.
So controls were needed lest the conscious mind, denied full use of the animal's innate taboos, run away with itself. Guilt, natural guilt, depends upon memory then.
It does not carry with it any built-in connection with punishments as you think of it. Once more, it was meant as a preventive measure. Any violation against nature would bring about a feeling of guilt so that when a like situation was encountered in the future, man would, in that moment of reflection, not repeat the same action.
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 creature-hood. 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.
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.
The collection of unrecognized artificial guilts, built up through the centuries, has led to such an accumulation of repressed energy that its release has resulted in violent action. Thus the hatred of one generation of adults whose parents were killed in a war helps generate the next one.
Thou shalt not violate. Again, the injunction had to be flexible enough to cover any situations in which the conscious species could become involved. The animal's instincts and their natural situations kept their numbers in bounds; and with unconscious, unknowing courtesy they made room for all others.
Thou shalt not violate against nature, life, or the earth. In your terms creature-hood, while striving for survival and longing for life, while abundant and rambunctious, is not inherently gluttonous. It follows the unconscious order that is within it even as there is a definite order, relationship and limit to the number of chromosomes. A cell that becomes omnivorous can destroy the life of the body.
Thou shalt not violate. So the principle applies to both life and death.
There is hardly anything mysterious in the idea that life can kill. On a biological level all death is hidden in life, and all life in death.
Viruses are alive, as I mentioned in another connection, and can be beneficial or detrimental according to other balances in the body. In cancer cells the growth principle runs wild; within creature-hood each of the species has its place, and if one multiplies out of its proper order then all life and the body of the earth itself comes into peril.
In those terms overpopulation is a violation. In the cases of both war and of overgrowth, the species has ignored its natural guilt. 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.
When women give birth in a crowded world they also know, and with a portion of their conscious minds, that a violation is involved. When your species sees that it is destroying other species and disrupting the natural balance, then it is consciously aware of its violation. When such natural guilt is not faced there are other mechanisms that must be employed. Again at the risk of repeating myself: Many of your problems result from the fact that you do not accept the responsibility of your own consciousness. It is meant to assess the reality that is unconsciously formed in direct replica of your thoughts and expectations.
When you do not embrace this conscious knowledge, but refuse it, you are not using one of the finest “tools” ever created by your species, and you are to a large extent denying your birthright and heritage.
When this happens, the species by default must fall back upon vestiges of old instincts – that were not geared to operate in conjunction with a conscious reasoning mind, and do not comprehend your experience; that finds your “moment of reflection” an impertinent denial of impulse. So man loses full use of the animals' regulated, graceful instinct, and yet denies the conscious and emotional discrimination given him instead.
The messages sent as a result are so highly contradictory that you are caught in a position where true instinct cannot reign, nor can reason prevail. Instead a distorted version of instinct results, along with a bastard use of sense as the species tries desperately to regulate its course.
Presently you have a condition in which overpopulation is compensated for by wars, and if not by wars, then by diseases. Yet who must die? The young who would be the parents of children. An understanding of the nature of natural guilt's integrity would save you from such predicaments.
The “demons”, your projections, are then placed upon a national enemy, or the leader of another race; sometimes whole masses of population will project upon other large groups the images of their own un-faced frustrations. Even in Augustus you find the hero and the villain, separate and diversified. As a man can be so divided, so can a nation and a world. So can a species.
So, therefore, can a family be so divided, and one member always appear as a hero and one the villain or the demon.
You may have two children, one of whom, generally speaking, behaves like Augustus One, and one who acts like Augustus Two. Because one seems so compliant and docile and one is so violent and unruly, you may never see the connection between their behavior; thinking them so obviously different. Yet if being “good”, polite, and compliant is not the usual state of normal children, neither is incessant violent activity. In such cases what you usually have is a situation in which one child is acting out un-faced aggressive behavior for the whole family. Such unreconciled patterns of activity also mean that love is not being freely expressed.
Love is outgoing, as aggression is. You cannot inhibit one without similarly affecting the other, so under such conditions the docile loving child is usually projecting and expressing the restrained love for the family as a whole. Both the villain and the hero will be in trouble, however, for each are denying other legitimate aspects of their experience.
The same applies then to nations. Natural guilt is a creative mechanism, meant to serve as a conscious spur in the solving of problems that, in your terms, no other animals ever had. By taking advantage of it you leap still further through unknown frontiers, and break through into dimensions of awareness that were always latent since the birth of the conscious mind.
Natural guilt, followed, is a wise guide that brings along with it not only biological integrity, but triggers within consciousness aspects of activity that must otherwise remain closed.
Give us a moment. End of chapter.
- pages 129-148, The Nature of Personal Reality, by Jane Roberts
