Mike's commentary · The Nature of Personal Reality, Chapter 17

The "Introduction" and "Key Points of This Chapter" were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not words spoken by Mike during his lectures. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).

Introduction

This chapter begins with Jane's nighttime transmission of material and her automatic writing supplement on the weight issue, discussing how beliefs create a sense of powerlessness and project inner problems outward as bodily symptoms or social phenomena. Through the Tiening case and institutions such as hospitals, prisons, and nursing homes, it shows how conversion, illness, and crime often stem from inner conflicts that have not been faced. It points out that the psychic territory of power is inviolable, that the point of power is in the present, and that changing beliefs can restore self-healing and personal power.

Key Points of This Chapter

• Beliefs create reality, and natural hypnosis leads people to seek out and reinforce experiences that match their beliefs while avoiding situations that threaten those beliefs.
• Inner problems such as powerlessness and feelings of worthlessness are projected outward as physical symptoms, illness, crime, or social institutions.
• The case of Tining illustrates that the feeling of being controlled and hypnotized stems from denied personal power and responsibility for one's own actions.
• Isolating institutions such as hospitals, prisons, and nursing homes reflect and reinforce the sense of powerlessness and the belief clusters of the groups involved.
• The point of power is in the present; only by changing beliefs and acknowledging personal power can one restore self-healing and change both personal and social reality.

Main Text

From Dream to Text: One of Jane's Nighttime Experiments

The title of Chapter 17, the original title Seth gave, is actually a bit longer: "Natural Hypnosis and Healing, and the Transference of Physical Symptoms into Other Levels of Activity." This chapter is actually a tail end, a latter half, of the last session of Chapter 16.

Before getting into the formal content, let me first talk about something very interesting that happened to Jane. Last week, while Jane was sleeping at night, she kept transmitting the Seth material, and what she spoke was not content that had already been covered, but material that had not yet been delivered in the future. In her dreams she began to speak, and there was one distinctive feature: she could not hear Seth's voice, only her own voice speaking there. She did this every night, for about a week straight. She felt she was giving a lecture at night, and she clearly remembered what she was saying, even more clearly than when she normally did the transmission herself.

Not long after today's session began, the same effect returned. So she decided to do an experiment. The next morning she wrote:

When I woke up, I felt that there were four or five whole chapters of material all right there. If only I could find a way to transcribe them immediately.

So at 3:15 she began trying to write it down. But she found that the content of these four or five chapters had all been there, very clearly, yet when she tried to write them down, most of it disappeared. By the time she reached the desk, all the fine points and the smoothly polished sentences were gone, leaving only a few ideas, a few concepts; the words were all gone.

Clearly this material must come through the session format.

Her current ability has not yet reached that state. During sessions, she can speak the material aloud, and then Rob records it beside her; but material received in dreams, although her consciousness was very clear, would quickly be forgotten once she woke up. In the end, only about a page of fragmentary notes remained for Jane, along with two possible titles. Although she did not know whether Seth would use these in her book, it would still be thought-provoking material.

As for the few concepts she wrote down, we can see in the later chapters whether they will appear again in the Seth material. One of them she felt should be called "The Chapter of Power," but whether it will actually be called that, we will see later.

Every person has his or her own inviolable psychic territory of power. No illness or other condition is allowed to invade it.

Thinking in terms of power is much better than thinking in terms of deficiency. The power of life, of action, of words. People confuse this with the power they exert over their environment and over others — people confuse the power we exert over the external environment, over the people around us, with this true inner power. She said this power is not that power. Then we wonder, why does the power we exert have no effect? The power we exert over our surroundings and over other people is not the true power; that power has little effect.

Yet each person must ultimately realize that you cannot give up power in one area without...

This is just a rough notation; you do not need to get hung up on it, because it is only a general concept of Seth's that she remembered. What it means is, you cannot give up power in one area and then ask, "Why is there no result?" When you keep pouring energy into changing the external environment and other people, yet never see any effect, at a certain point it threatens the inner core and the psychic territory of power, and you begin to feel a sense of powerlessness about yourself. You discover: why have I been so focused on doing certain things, yet there is no effect? I have been working very hard in my environment, and I have been very attentive to the people around me, so why is there no effect?

When this sense of powerlessness arises, it affects the power of your inner core, and thus it also affects what he mentioned earlier — the inviolable psychic territory of power. What was originally inviolable may come under threat. In any area, when you believe yourself to be powerless, that belief will establish its own possibilities in other areas. That negative suggestion operates just as a negative suggestion does.

As for its content, the later Seth material will introduce it specifically in the following chapters, so I will not go into it here. She is only giving you an excerpt here, to let you know that Jane has such an ability. She also remembered that in a certain chapter there would be mention of the personal purpose of a person's entire life, and the innate limitations your body has set — such as illness, health, poverty and wealth, ability, and so on, which ones you chose at birth. And as people say, faith and belief can move mountains¹, but they can also cause natural disasters. Jane remembered roughly these few things; she could not recall anything else.

Jane's Automatic Writing: A Supplement on the Weight Issue

The morning after this session, we discussed the above material from the day before, and it led me to read aloud Seth's material from the previous session — the last session of Chapter 16 — about the weight-loss issue, about beliefs and body weight. Then after lunch, Jane spontaneously wrote down a passage. She regarded this passage as a supplement to Seth's material on body weight.

She said, when I did this, I did not hear any voice. She did not hear Seth's voice in her mind; she felt these concepts were embedded into her brain, but it was she who held the pen and wrote them out. This work is very close to Seth's manner of expression. We thought it might have been an extension of her efforts from the previous night — to see what "book work" she could do on her own.

The following is what Jane herself wrote, on Thursday afternoon, May 30, 1973, sitting at her desk, writing "about Seth's book":

Dieting can indeed temporarily serve as an outward sign of the initiative you have taken hold of and grasped. Dieting therefore becomes important. However, often an unsuccessful dieting pattern begins to occur, and then it turns into a series of negative suggestions.

The act of dieting — that is, I am going to make up my mind, I am going to lose weight — is itself a signal of an inner initiative, like a sign, a marker. But after this dieting begins, once a series of unsuccessful dieting patterns develops, it will instead create a series of negative suggestions for you.

So why does it fail? Where does this resistance come from?

It comes mainly from the result of conflicting beliefs. You think you are overweight, and you accept it as a fact. So in the face of that belief, the steps to reduce weight become unreasonable.

You think you are overweight — this is a belief of your own, and you accept it as a fact. You feel heavy, so you go on a diet, but the very fact that you believe you are truly overweight is itself an extremely strong belief. At that point, all the other weight-reduction steps you take, all the methods, and your belief that you are truly heavy — these two are in conflict with each other. The matter of your losing weight becomes impractical and impossible, because you firmly believe you are heavy; that is why you go on a diet in the first place.

The same situation applies to the case of being underweight. In each case, constantly watching the scale becomes another negative stimulus, which instead reinforces the original situation. Efforts to eat more will be resisted by the chronically underweight person, just as efforts to restrain oneself from eating are resisted by the overweight person.

We restrain ourselves from eating more — originally we ate three steamed buns, now we eat one; originally we ate two bowls of noodles, now we eat one bowl — this kind of restraint is a resistance for the overweight person; it is very painful and very hard to bear. People who have never tried to lose weight cannot understand that kind of discomfort. And for the underweight person, if you try to get him to eat more, he is also very resistant. If you have seen that kind of thin person, you will know that he eats just a tiny bit, like a cat's portion, but no matter what you say, he will not eat more.

Not only do these reactions occur, but the opposite tendency is also very strong:

The focus on not eating, and the tension it produces, will instead cause an increase in appetite.

For the person trying to lose weight, you keep thinking, "I will not eat, I will eat less, I will skip a meal." This focus on not eating produces a kind of tension, which in turn causes your appetite to surge, and your food intake actually increases. And for the underweight person, the more he thinks about eating more, the less he actually eats.

The belief that one is underweight, which has gained the upper hand, causes the former to be interpreted as impossible.

His belief that he is simply too thin has gained the upper hand, so the idea that "if I want to eat more, I can gain weight" seems impossible to him.

So what is the best approach? After all that has been said, many people are now confused: so how exactly should I lose weight, or gain weight?

Stop all these efforts. Immediately begin to change your beliefs.

As shown in the previous chapter, change your beliefs — believe that you are not fat, believe that you are not thin; these are the beliefs to change. As for how to change these beliefs, he gave exercises earlier: 5 to 10 minutes a day, doing that belief exercise.

The treatment methods of weight-loss groups will succeed... at least temporarily. The reason for their success is that the belief in one's own value is emphasized. Unfortunately, however, body weight is attacked as bad or evil.

In a weight-loss group, everyone's belief in their own value is emphasized, so it works in the short term. But in a weight-loss club, we all think being overweight is bad; we treat excess weight as a bad, undesirable thing, and a symbolic moral judgment enters the picture. In fact, being fat and being thin are both normal and natural things, but we think being fat is bad, so this moral judgment comes in. That is why this kind of treatment rarely has long-term effects. Because from then on, any weight gained carries even more negative meaning — after you have lost the weight, even if you gain back one or two pounds, you will feel that the negative emotions are already starting to come.

This passage is a supplement to the weight-loss discussion in the last session of Chapter 16. You can read this together with the last part of Chapter 16, especially for those who truly want to lose weight or gain weight.

Session 661

The Social Transference of Symptoms: Projection and Conversion

Next is Session 661, Monday evening, May 7, 1973. The previous session was too short, so this one follows right on its heels. He mentions that tomorrow is Jane's birthday -- so now you know Jane's birthday is May 8.

Seth says:

I did not mean to imply that all social workers are driven by personal problems.

At the very beginning of Chapter 17, he said that some people get a serious illness, and after a few years, they suddenly join some public welfare activities, do some charitable work, and then their illness gets better. And as long as the charitable work continues for a long stretch of time, the illness never comes back. But here he specifically emphasizes: I did not mean to imply that all such social workers, all these people doing volunteer work in society, are driven by personal problems -- no, that is not what I meant. You must remember this. Many people do public welfare work in a very healthy, very sunny, very positive way. He is only saying that some people are like this, not everyone. Seth does not mean that here.

On the other hand, it is true that many such problems are turned into challenges through a change of mind, and then used as the impetus for social reform.

This is very interesting. After your beliefs change, this problem turns into a challenge, and then this challenge becomes the original driving force for you to carry out social change.

In such cases, the dilemma is projected outside of the self, and then seen as an exterior situation that can be manipulated.

Clearly it is an inner problem, but he projects it outside and treats it as an external situation.

This does involve a magical alteration. It should not be interpreted, however, to mean that all creative acts are the result of personal problems or neuroses. In fact, the opposite is true.

That is to say, people who are neurotic and have personal problems actually lack creativity.

Personally, such a projected problem can never really be solved.

You must remember this: it cannot really be solved. It can only be temporarily solved, because its root has not been understood. Some people project their own problems onto the things around them, and then, in order to solve that external problem, their own problem seems to get better. But their inner fundamental problem has not been solved.

The rest of this session is all about practical examples of the preceding passage. How do we project our inner problems -- not just health problems, but problems of belief, problems of the psyche, problems of cognition -- onto society, and then create new problems in society. When we try to solve those new problems, we find that the fundamental problem cannot be solved. Why do our social problems multiply the more we try to solve them? Seth tells you here: your original problem was only a problem inside your own heart. But you are unwilling to go back inside to solve this problem, so you project it onto your external environment. At this point, when you want to solve the problem in the environment, you come up with a new method or a new way to solve the problem that has been produced. But the problem that was originally produced has its root in the inner self, not outside. In order to solve this external matter itself, you have a new solution, and this new solution will bring new problems. Ultimately it cannot really solve the problem -- it seems to solve it, it seems to bring social progress, but it is not a real solution.

Here the phone rang, and he paused for a moment, then continued:

Since the root is not understood, any exterior manipulation within the social structure will not be very effective.

The root is not solved, so those methods of solving problems in society -- you cannot say they are ineffective; to some degree they have a certain effect, but they are not very effective. They do not ultimately solve the problem.

The individual will then see the difficulty personalized in each problem.

It is completely personalized -- a problem personalized for the individual.

Therefore even improvements within the social structure will be invisible to the perception of such a person.

Any good changes in society, any positive things, he cannot see, because his problem is not solved. Since his problem is not solved, he keeps looking at that problem, keeps reinforcing that problem. So this difficulty has been personalized by you, and it is not solved. And those truly good changes in society, you cannot see them; they have not been noticed by you.

Compared to the difficulties, such improvements seem insignificant.

We often say "the world is going downhill" and so on about society... You cannot see the good things; all you see are the bad things. You repeatedly emphasize those difficulties, while the real improvements to society, you cannot see either.

If you concentrate upon personal illness, the same reaction occurs.

If you put all your energy into the illness of your own body, the same reaction will occur -- you find that any progress is invisible to you, and none of it matters. Because the focus of your attention is entirely on the negative illness itself, or on the suffering that the illness brings. You are still paying attention to "I still feel awful, still uncomfortable, it still hurts here, it still aches there," but you are not comparing it to the fact that it has actually already improved a great deal compared to before. You keep fantasizing about returning all at once to a state of complete freedom from illness, and you cannot see that it is gradually improving. Seth is saying that the reason is that you have placed your focus entirely on the negative side.

The Trap of Conversion and True Enlightenment

A sudden conversion may free an individual completely from physical illness.

Any... kind of conversion -- this is under a general term, and I include the exchange of intense emotion, or involvement in new emotion, joining an organization, or a sense of belonging.

The "conversion" here does not refer simply to conversion in Buddhism, or baptism in Christianity, or the initiation ritual in Islam. He means conversion in a broad sense -- any kind of conversion, including the kind that can exchange for intense emotion, or entering into new emotion. For example, falling in love, or joining an organization, entering some spiritual group, some body-mind-spirit training class -- all of these give a sense of belonging. He says this may involve religion or may not involve religion; it may involve politics -- joining some political group -- art, or falling in love.

In these areas, regardless of the nature or cause of the problem, it is more or less magically transferred to another level of activity.

Your original problems have all been transferred to another level, and this is something you projected yourself. It is you yourself who projected a problem in one area onto another place. The huge blockage of energy has been moved away, because the energy has been transferred out.

An individual who believed himself to be evil may now instead see the world, or other beliefs, or those who belong to a certain political party, as evil.

If a person's inner belief holds that he himself is evil, at this time he will project this evil onto the external world. He believes that certain people in the world, a certain type of people, or people in a certain organization are evil.

He then feels himself freed from the problem itself.

Because he feels that he originally believed himself to be evil, and now he believes that other people are evil. He is then completely ready to attack others -- he sees these evil phenomena in others and attacks them, and does so with a great sense of self-righteousness and full justification.

Here Seth speaks very thoroughly, and also very harshly. What does "great" mean? He feels that what he is doing is very correct, that those people are all evil, and that he is righteous, so he considers himself great, self-righteous, and fully justified. At this time, when he attacks others, this attacking behavior essentially comes from his inner belief that "I myself am evil, I myself am not truly good." But he does not dare admit this, does not dare truly face the fact of why he is evil, so he projects this problem outward. Actually, he could change this belief from within -- the previous two chapters have already introduced this -- as long as he faces himself, admits this belief, and then changes it, the problem can be solved. But he does not, because he does not dare look at it, does not dare face this phenomenon, does not dare face this belief of his own, so he projects it outward.

Here, I make a distinction between such conversion experiences and true mystical understanding. They may both come in an instant.

This kind of conversion experience -- as if joining some organization, as if entering some group, as if beginning a new emotion, arousing some new emotion -- and true understanding of the mystical, true enlightenment, are not the same thing. They are two different matters. But some people cannot tell them apart, so Seth makes a very clear distinction here.

Why is there that wonderful feeling after conversion? The preceding two paragraphs have already made it clear: because you have projected this thing outside.

Let me give an example. When you encounter some setbacks in life, and you convert to Buddhism, after joining this Buddhist system, you have a natural feeling -- you feel very comfortable inside, as if you have found a sense of belonging to a big family, as if you have found a mountain to lean on. The Buddha, the bodhisattvas, the dharma protectors, the vajras, including your master, your fellow disciples, and so on -- these are all your supports. Their abilities are all greater than yours, their level is all higher than yours. Then you feel a sense of security, and then you feel very peaceful. At the same time, what do you do? You regard all those who have not entered Buddhism as your opposites. You think they have not awakened, that they are still spinning around in the mundane world, still in ignorance, still unable to let go of these so-called greed, anger, and delusion. You actually look down on them -- in Buddhism this is called "arrogance" -- you are looking down on others. Actually, at this time, in Seth's words, you are projecting. You have taken the dissatisfaction in your heart, changed groups, and projected it onto society. So at this time, it feels as if your heart is more comfortable, because the energy that was blocking you has been removed, and you seem much more comfortable, and your heart is much more peaceful. But has your real problem been solved? It has not been solved. You have merely projected it outside.

So what is true mystical enlightenment?

Enlightenment involves seeing no enemy, and no such arrogance.

You will not feel that I am better than you, I am smarter than you, I am more spiritual and wiser than you, that I am higher than you in every way. That all of you are as ignorant as ants, not yet civilized, like barbarians, while I am a person who has received higher spiritual awakening, and I am different from you -- there is no such arrogance. There is no aggressiveness either. None of it.

Or need for self-justification.

This last point is very important. He does not need self-justification. He does not need to find a reason for the existence of the self, and he does not need to put a label on his own identity. These are things that many people need to overcome in the beginning. Many people say, why am I such and such -- they must find a label for themselves: because I am a monk, because I have taken refuge, because I am a lay practitioner, because I am a Christian, because I am a person of such and such a kind, and I should do such and such -- they need to find many reasons for the existence of the self, otherwise they do not dare face their own existence directly. So this is a matter of one's own beliefs. The difference between true enlightenment and the temporary peace and joy of the heart after conversion is still very great. They are completely different. Seth here is distinguishing them for you.

Small Love and Great Love: The Awakening of Value

Then he singles out romantic love and gives it a separate analysis. You can see how he analyzes it.

Love, as it is often experienced, allows an individual a period of time in which he gets his sense of self-value from another person.

So-called love, as it is often experienced, is a person seeing his own sense of value in another person during a certain period of time.

And at least temporarily, the belief that another person thinks he is good outweighs his belief that he lacks a sense of self-value.

Within a certain time frame, he wants at least temporarily to make the other person feel that he is a good person, that he is good, that he is kind. This belief outweighs the belief in his heart that he lacks a sense of value.

Again, I make a distinction between this and a greater love.

The kind of love described above is the small love of the mundane world. There is a distinction between it and a greater love.

In the greater love, two individuals understand their own worth, and are able to give and to receive.

The other person can give, and he can also calmly accept the other person -- accept and give. This is its most important characteristic. And what is small love? Small love is constantly taking. He feels that he is giving, but what is the purpose of his giving? It is to make the other person say he is good, to make the other person love him well, to make the other person say this person is wonderful, excellent, handsome, beautiful, good-looking, has a great figure, is lovely, gentle, kind, good at managing the household -- all kinds of good, anyway.

If one day you love someone and do not ask the other person to repay you with this kind of "thinking you are good" idea, then you begin gradually to rise from small love toward great love. Your sense of your own value does not need the recognition of others, nor the agreement of others, and even less the appreciation and affirmation of others. You have a clear understanding of your own value, and you do not take the other person's affirmation as the standard. And at this time, you can still see where the other person's value lies, and you also know where your own value lies. While fulfilling yourself, you can also fulfill the other person. You can clearly understand the value of both of you, and you can clearly know that when the two of you are together, the value of both of you will be maximized. This kind of love is true great love, transcending the small love of the ordinary world. If you want to have a correct understanding of romantic love, you can look at the passage above.

(Here Seth asked Rob to get some beer, so I will not go on for now.)

Natural Hypnosis: You Create Your Own Reality

He repeats once again: you create your own reality. He has said this countless times already.

When you look at the world, at social groups and political groups, at your friends, your personal experience is all drawn into the realm of activity by your beliefs.

What is personal experience? It is how you perceive your world, perceive social groups, perceive a political group, perceive your friends, perceive your surrounding environment -- this all depends on a completely personalized experience of your own. And this personal experience is entirely brought about by your beliefs. In other words, your beliefs determine what you experience. What you perceive, what you experience, what you feel, is entirely attracted into your field of activity by your beliefs. Only then can you experience it.

Natural hypnosis, as explained in the last chapter, will lead you to seek out situations that confirm your beliefs, and to avoid those that threaten them.

It will help you find situations that confirm your beliefs, and avoid those situations that threaten your beliefs. It simply will not let them appear.

You will try to project a problem outward to free yourself.

After you project it outward, you make yourself free and relaxed. If you do this, then the problem to be solved seems to be forever outside of you -- because you have projected it out, it seems as if this problem is outside of you. But then, you are relaxed, you are free. You have not faced it, you have not solved it, but you also cannot solve it, because there is no way to magnify it for observation and examination.

The Case of Tining: The Projection of Powerlessness

Let us look at the situation of a woman I shall call Tining. Today she called Ruburt from a western state. He says, let us use her case to look at the difficulties that can arise.

Tining is a middle-aged woman with a higher education. She has several grown children, all in college or working, and her financial situation is also quite good. She possesses everything that money can buy -- mansions, yachts, nothing is beyond her reach.

She called Ruburt almost in a frantic state, saying she desperately wanted help. Because she had already written several letters to Ruburt, and Ruburt was aware of her situation.

Why was she so frantic? She firmly believed that she had been cursed, hypnotized, and had fallen under the control of another person. She had gone to one psychic after another, and had also tried automatic writing. Different psychics had all told her that she would become a psychic teacher, and had given her various secret words and techniques to ward off those evil influences -- that is, the curses, the hypnosis, the control by others mentioned above.

Ruburt correctly sensed that this woman had a need in her life for enthusiasm, excitement, and originality. Clearly, Tining sat all day in her lovely home, sat in her mansion with nothing to do. She made no effort to truly face her situation, but instead went to others to face it on her behalf.

Now that you see this, you can probably guess what situation she was in. A sense of worthlessness. Her situation was that she had no value -- no one needed her. Her husband did not need her, her children had all grown up and did not need her, she did not have a job, society did not need her, no one needed her. Although she was very rich, it was useless. She had no sense of value. Her lack of a sense of value was the problem she faced. But she did not face this problem; instead she went to others to face it on her behalf, thereby reinforcing this sense of powerlessness. The more she went to others to solve her problems, the more powerless she felt. That is why she felt cursed, hypnotized, and under the control of another person -- are not these so-called feelings all experienced by this inner belief of worthlessness, attracted into her life, and felt by her? If we analyze these symptoms of hers more deeply, are they not a sense of worthlessness and powerlessness?

This involved a most serious giving up of both psychic and biological nature.

Biologically, psychically, and physiologically, it is all a very serious giving up. This is very frightening.

She felt more trapped than an animal caught in a terrible situation.

She felt even more than an animal truly caught in a trap that she was in a trap and simply could not climb out. Why? She denied her own ability to act. She felt that since she could not climb out, what was the point of struggling? She had fallen into a trap, and she felt she had fallen into a deep trap from which there was no escape, so she might as well simply not act.

The repressed power itself was then transferred.

She wanted to escape, wanted to struggle, wanted to break through this cage of worthlessness and powerlessness. But she also told herself, "I have fallen into a trap, and struggling is useless," so this power was repressed. The repressed power then began to transfer -- in Tining's situation, she placed it onto other people. How did it transfer?

If she could not make her own decisions, then another person, through long-distance hypnosis, forced her to act, whether or not she wanted to.

She could not make decisions, did not know what to do, so someone else directed her to do this and that, forced her to do this and that, as if she had been cursed. She felt that this was her state. Actually, what is this? This is the projection of her own heart. She projected out such a person, and she truly believed that some person in real life was forcing her to act through long-distance hypnosis.

Now this other person did not possess powers that Tining herself did not have.

This so-called other person of hers -- the one who remotely controlled her, hypnotized her, and directed her actions. The power she described was not something Tining herself did not have. Why did she insist that someone else direct her? Why did someone else have to hypnotize her from a distance and direct her to do this and that, while she herself could not direct herself? She also had this ability, but she did not believe she had it.

Tining faithfully believed in good and evil.

She believed very strongly in good and evil; her sense of good and evil was very strong. Therefore, when she was convinced that she was in the grip of demonic forces, she began to pray.

Hence, as Ruburt pointed out, your prayer itself is but a weak surrender to evil that is so powerful.

The very act of praying represents your weakness. Only when you have no other recourse do you pray. If you felt you had power, would you need to pray? No.

Prayer is not based upon any true belief in the power of good.

You do not believe that good is truly powerful. If you believed that good is truly powerful, you would believe that good can overcome evil. But your prayer is not built on a belief in the power of good; it is built on superstitious hope. The difference between these two is very subtle. The difference lies in this: you do not believe that good is truly powerful, that it can truly conquer all and never be defeated, like an indestructible diamond body that cannot be controlled or violated by anyone. And she was superstitious -- superstitious about what? She said, "Since evil has power, then the power of good must also exist." That is what she thought. She did not truly believe that good itself is powerful; she merely felt that since evil has power, good should also have power. Between this conviction and superstition, there is only this small difference.

After hearing about the communications from automatic writing, she began to write automatically. Through automatic writing, it seemed as if someone was controlling her, writing out instructions -- what you should do today, what things you should do. Through automatic writing, she gave herself instructions, and then she believed that this automatic writing was some person remotely controlling her through long-distance hypnosis.

About the Tining Case

By the time Jane was working through these issues, she no longer needed Seth's help; she could find the root of the problem on her own. Jane's intuitive ability was already very strong by then. She did not arrive at it through a series of theoretical studies, but could genuinely see the essence of the problem.

After this kind of automatic writing, Ruburt could explain that it was simply the repressed components of your subconscious looking for a necessary outlet. What is repressed is repressed power, a feeling of powerlessness, yet the person herself is someone who needs passion, needs vitality, needs to be of value, someone who is needed. When she is not needed, she needs to take some action to prove her existence, to seek this reasonable sense of existing, this sense of value. But she also tells herself there is no way out, that she is trapped and cannot get out. And then at this point she conjures up this so-called hypnotist, or a psychic, who controls her through automatic writing.

She suggested that Tining go find a job, and stop going to see psychics. It was useless. Instead, she should affirm her individuality and take responsibility for her own actions. By individuality is meant personal value, the meaning and value of a person's existence in this world, and one must take responsibility for it.

Tining believed that the way other people treated her was very unusual, because they had all been hypnotized, so their attitudes toward her were all abnormal. If someone frowned at her, she took it as the result of a hypnotic suggestion. She had been hypnotized by the other person she believed in, so that hypnotist was merely using this person to frown at her. All of this, to us normal people, sounds utterly absurd. But to certain people, it is indeed all too real -- the predicaments in her life, the difficulties in her life. So she called Jane in a state of extreme panic.

But whenever you assign the components of your own experience to an external, outside source, you are really doing the same thing Tining did.

He uses Tining's example here to tell us: when we project our inner problems, inner experiences, and inner experiential dilemmas that we cannot resolve onto the outside, we are doing exactly the same thing Tining did.

Belief Systems and Rationality

She felt that certain rituals or foods would block off this evil hypnotic suggestion. She felt that performing certain rites, or eating certain foods, would block off this evil hypnosis that was giving her instructions through automatic writing.

Yet many of you take vitamins, also convinced that this can save you from all kinds of illness — is that not the same thing? Your illness is also caused by inner causes, but you do not go and resolve them. Just like this Tining, her problem is caused by inner causes, and she does not go and resolve it; she hopes to resolve it through outer means — through some rites, some foods, some practices, rituals. That is how we treat ourselves in daily life.

He said that within Tining's belief system, she does things very rationally. Do not forget she is a middle-aged woman, highly educated, her children have already graduated from college and started working, and she does things very sensibly. So you think, how could a sensible woman do such a thing?

He said, within your belief system, do you not also consider yourself very rational? When have you ever thought you were crazy? You would not think you are crazy; you would think everything you do is rational, sensible. But step outside and look — what essential difference is there between what you do and what Tining does? You project all your inner problems onto the outside, hoping to resolve them through outer means, and do not go to the inner root to resolve them.

You firmly believe in the reality of illness. Illness may not hunt you down as viciously as the evil Tining believed was threatening her, but the problem is the same.

Illness is not as terrifying as Tining feeling that some evil thing was coming to hunt her down, but the way you view illness is just as real as Tining believing there was an evil person remotely controlling her, hypnotizing her, wanting to put her to death. Actually these are all things within our own minds, but we all externalize them into an objective, actual existence. We project our inner problems into an outer objective existence, which is illness; just as Tining projected her inner sense of worthlessness and powerlessness into an outer person who seemed to command her, persecute her, frame her, and curse her. These two are the same kind of thing.

The Role of Natural Hypnosis

If you believe that every time you stand in this kind of gap you will catch a cold—he is referring to those narrow passageways between tall buildings, like in New York, the very narrow walkway between two buildings—then you are using natural hypnosis to tell yourself that this will definitely give you a cold.

If you believe that you must be at everyone's beck and call, then you will be like Tining. Tining believed that she had to do whatever the hypnotist who hypnotized her remotely told her to do. Whatever someone said, she had to do it.

In her case, Tining gave up the responsibility for action and originality, yet because a person must act, she assigned the reasons to someone else.

Because a person must act; you cannot just lie there like a vegetable and do nothing. Tining now had nothing to do. She did not have to work, the family income was good, and the children no longer needed her care, so she had to act. But she assigned the right to act to someone else. Clearly she could have made some proactive arrangements herself, but she did not. She gave up and handed it over to someone else.

Ruburt also pointed this out. Tining asked Seth for advice, asking how to resolve this matter, and Ruburt quite correctly said, you:

Must learn not to depend on others, and use your own viewpoint.

You must stop trying to use one symbol to fight against another, and look at your own life and beliefs.

That is, you should not use one symbol to fight against another symbol; that is useless. You must look at the conflicts within yourself, the conflicts in your beliefs. What was the conflict in Tining's inner beliefs? It was that she felt a sense of powerlessness. She should just act, that is right, but at the same time she told herself she could not act. Are these not two things? So she conjured up two symbols to fight against each other, which was useless.

You project your dilemma or your abilities outward into other areas of activity, but you cannot solve your difficulties or properly use your power until you understand what forms your reality, and that your power resides in the present moment.

Only when you understand this point, when you understand this concept, can you truly solve the problem.

Tynan's Choice

He said Tynan carefully chose to have this happen in these lower-risk areas. This was not a conscious choice on her part, but it was indeed caused by her conscious beliefs. Her children had grown up, she felt lonely, no longer needed, and she negated the vibrant lifestyle she had previously had of caring for her family. Her energy, as you can imagine, was actually quite great. She had previously taken care of several children and been consumed by the little ones, and now there was no outlet for it. This is a problem many middle-aged women who care for their families and children will face.

He said that although her life was difficult now, it was also very exciting. She was a heroine, she had to fight against evil, to fight against the cosmic forces of good and evil. She felt that an evil force was controlling her. Why control her? Because she was important. She was so important that there was another person who even wanted to control her. She was a key person, a VIP.

Even animals seek stimulation and feel a kind of enthusiasm for existence, so in a misguided way, Tynan was still giving expression to a necessary need of her existence.

This way of hers, creating trouble for herself, was it not also providing an opportunity for expression for herself? We Chinese call this "zuo." Actually, this kind of "zuo" is necessary, because she needed this release of energy, she needed an outlet for this power.

Ruburt also suggested that she see a psychological counselor. Only when she was ready to exchange the beliefs she already had for beliefs that would allow her to fulfill her abilities would she no longer have difficulties. She needed to replace her current beliefs of powerlessness with beliefs that she could allow herself to be capable of doing things, beliefs that would bring back her sense of power. Only then would she no longer have difficulties, only then could she truly get better.

However, Tynan's body was very healthy, and she was a very attractive woman, with great feminine charm. She did not choose a situation that would endanger her health or beauty, nor did she choose to make her body sick or ugly, nor was she involved in any extramarital affairs -- because her energy was very abundant, and at such times some people would choose to dissipate their pent-up energy through affairs, but she chose none of these.

Instead, she chose the challenging field of channeling. Because this field is so extraordinary, so mysterious, full of mystique, any difficulties encountered there would automatically carry a kind of illusory allure. Even the difficulties she encountered were different from others' -- others got sick, had affairs, and so on, and she felt those were too vulgar, not fitting her heroic persona. She absolutely had to do something different from others. The more she was encouraged by other people with the same beliefs, the deeper she sank.

The Inner Territory of Power

Earlier in this chapter, Seth obtained material while Jane was asleep, and from here he begins to speak of this:

Each person has what I call an inner territory of power.

Each person's psyche has a core of power, and it represents an inviolable domain. There a person holds firm, a person maintains his sovereignty, maintains the sovereignty by which he is himself. He is aware of his own uniqueness, he feels himself distinct from others, and the core by which he calls himself "I" and does not confuse himself with others lies in his feeling that on this psychic territory he has his own ability and uniqueness.

This psychic region will be protected at all costs, it does not allow others to invade this domain. And there, indeed, there is immunity to all illness and defects.

Within that psychic region, he is immune to all illness and defects, he will not fall ill, and the power is at its utmost firmness and strength.

Other portions of the psyche may become battlegrounds for problems, but as long as this main territory is not touched, then the person will not feel threatened in the truly critical aspects.

The main critical aspects are his health and his mental state, and these aspects will not be threatened.

So, although Tining talked at length about despair, so despairing and so anguished, she nevertheless chose the arena of conflict well—she defined it in the field of channeling, and avoided any disfigurement of her beauty or serious health problems. And for her, those would have been far more dangerous. She did not even choose an affair—if an affair went wrong she might have lost this family—she did not choose that either. What she chose was a field of channeling that seemed unrelated to all of these.

Why? Precisely because the inner territory of power within her was not invaded, was not touched, so the core of her being was not affected. Her family, her wealth, her health, her beauty—none of it was affected.

Because of the characteristics of different individuals, another person will maintain, say, the inviolability of mental qualities, and resolve challenges through physical illness.

Perhaps for another person, in order to maintain the inviolability of such psychic qualities, he might let his own body fall ill as a way of resolving the problem.

Another possible choice is extreme poverty.

Projecting the unresolved conflict into that situation. The unresolved conflict is the conflict in your beliefs—for Tining it was the conflict between powerlessness and worthlessness: the more powerless she felt, the more worthless she felt, and the more worthless, the more powerless. But all she needed to do was take action, yet she told herself, hypnotized herself, that she had no way to take action and could only follow the commands of others.

Another person might choose alcoholism. Everyone is different; some people choose to make their bodies ill, some choose extreme poverty, some choose alcoholism.

In these cases, if a psychoanalyst or a friend tries to shift the area of his conflict, he may experience some feelings of panic.

Why? Because the alcoholic is very familiar with the battleground he has chosen. So you see many alcoholics drinking year after year, soaking in alcohol every day, and actually there is not much of a problem—he is very familiar with this battleground. He seems to drink too much every time, but in fact he knows that amount will not kill him—alcohol in sufficient quantity can kill a person, but he never reaches that state each time; each time he keeps himself in this state of having drunk too much, but not to the point of causing any real substantial effect on his body.

A sick person, if suddenly cured, must then face the dilemma that was previously ignored or personalized through the illness.

A person's illness arises because of conflicts in beliefs. The reason for the illness is that he did not deal with the problems of his beliefs, and projected them outward onto the illness, letting his body resolve the dilemma. But if the bodily illness suddenly heals, then he has no choice but to face his former problems again; he cannot escape.

When Tining was denied the framework she had chosen to support herself, she had to face the problems that had been projected onto it.

When this framework was denied, she had no choice but to face the problems projected onto it.

But all inner difficulties can be resolved through the understanding that you form your own reality and that your point of power is in the present.

When you smash these illusory frameworks conjured up by the so-called hypnotist, she then has no choice but to face on her own the most primal problems she once had—her own sense of powerlessness and her own lack of initiative, the sense of worthlessness and powerlessness.

The Transfer of Powerlessness

Not facing difficulties, they are actually challenges. If the habit of not facing difficulties is not addressed, it can become an addiction.

Difficulties are a challenge to you. If you do not face them, they will become an addiction, something addictive.

Powerlessness in one area can be transferred to other places, and when this happens through natural hypnosis, even the psychic territory of power will be attacked.

So you have a sense of powerlessness in one area, and then you transfer it to another place. For example, in the case of Tining, the children went to school, left home, and she was idle and had nothing to do. This was only a very small sense of powerlessness in one limited area. She only needed to find a new job, or find something meaningful to do. But she did not face it, did not resolve it, so it got transferred to other places.

When this happens through natural hypnosis, that is, when you hypnotize yourself in this way, truly believing that you have no power, truly believing that there is no way to resolve it, this sense of powerlessness will encroach upon that sacred and inviolable psychic territory of power you just mentioned. Even that region which is least susceptible to infringement, which is protected at all costs, will come under attack.

Here a person will become thoroughly enraged, and perhaps for the first time realize the nature of belief and its difficulties.

Here you have a life-and-death struggle in a creative manner.

Because the core of your inner power has been violated, has been attacked, you will have a life-and-death struggle. If you do not struggle, that part which you call yourself will be annihilated. At this point you begin to rise up and fight back.

As a result, some people will experience miraculous healings or changes in middle age.

Many people will become like this in real life: suddenly starting a business, or suddenly doing very well in business, or some physical illness suddenly healing, or suddenly making major changes, doing things they would never have done before, or from then on devoting themselves to public welfare or charity work. What is all this? It is that their persistent sense of powerlessness, that sense of self-negation, touches the deepest part of their inner being. Once touched, it produces what is called a life-and-death struggle, and the result of the struggle is that your power is conjured forth. After going through this life-and-death struggle, you will have miraculous healing and thorough change, and many people will discover that the second spring of life has begun.

These are all closely connected with your biological structure, whose original intent is to follow the conscious mind's interpretation of reality.

Criticism of the Hospital System

He says, if, as previously stated, "your thoughts are your reality," and your thoughts directly affect your body, then:

You seem very civilized because you send your sick people to hospitals where they are cared for. Of course, what you are doing is isolating together a group of people filled with negative beliefs about illness.

The reason a patient is sent to the hospital is precisely because he is sick, and this belief has already been reinforced -- you are sick, you are no longer the same as normal people, you are a patient. And both the patient and his doctor work under this premise; both the patient and the doctor believe that this patient is ill.

Women giving birth are also put into hospitals.

Nowadays we can only go to the hospital to give birth. You may think this is very humane, giving women the best protection -- how could something as dangerous as childbirth be done at home?

Yet the entire hospital system is arranged as though giving birth were not healthy, but rather the result of disease.

It makes you feel as though giving birth is like having an illness, because you have to go to the hospital, into the delivery room, into the obstetrics and gynecology department.

Stimuli connected with health are effectively blocked in such an organization.

The patients gather together, discussing their illnesses every day, communicating with each other about what symptoms you have and what symptoms I have. And they are denied the conditions of their normal and natural life; they have been taken from their natural living conditions and brought into the hospital, separated from their original living environment.

Compensatory motives are also involved.

That is, sometimes if they were given time alone, they might recover on their own. This compensatory motive -- he can heal himself. If you give him a little time, he will get better on his own. But you put him in the hospital, tell him this is a disease, and use scientific methods to declare that this disease must be treated in such and such a way, and everyone around you is this kind of patient, so you become convinced, and you yourself believe that it really is a disease.

The isolation in the hospital is unfortunate enough, but it is even more unfortunate if, on top of that, medication is given by those who want to help him without understanding the illness.

The doctors who want to help him often do not understand the illness -- they do not know that the cause of his illness lies in psychological reasons, in beliefs -- and yet they give him medication. In that case it is even worse; he is not only locked up in the hospital, but also fed drugs.

His beloved family members and relatives are only allowed to visit the patient at certain times and on certain occasions, so those who most want them to recover, those closest to them, those who love them most, are effectively prevented from making any natural, constructive efforts.

Once you are in the hospital, you can only listen to the doctors; you cannot listen to anyone else's suggestions. Those relatives who most want him to be healthy and recover, the family members' strong wish for him to get well -- that in itself is a healing ability, and it would also awaken his inner strength. But all of that is gone, replaced by facing cold doctors and nurses.

In effect, the patient is locked up in a prison, forced to focus on their illness. All of this is added on top of other dehumanizing measures.

For example, overcrowding, and the denial of personal privacy and dignity -- you have to use public toilets, or even urinate in full view of everyone; you are given a bedpan, you lie in the hospital bed, and you relieve yourself under the gaze of the patients on either side of you. This is a kind of assault on human nature and a stripping away of dignity.

This makes the patient feel powerless, manipulated by doctors and nurses who often do not have the time or energy to show concern, to show kindness, or to explain the illness in terms he can understand.

When you arrive at the hospital, the doctors and nurses face so many patients every day, so many sick people, that they have no time and no energy to show you warmth and care, nor do they have the time or energy to carefully explain to you, according to your level of understanding, what your illness is about. And then you are manipulated by such people.

Therefore, the patient is forced to transfer his sense of power to the doctors and nurses.

He has no choice; he is being manipulated, so he can only give his power to the doctors and nurses -- "They can cure me." But when you give your power to the doctors and nurses, does that not deepen your miserable situation? Because it once again reinforces the sense of powerlessness that caused his illness in the first place. Some people's illnesses are caused by a sense of powerlessness, yet this situation reinforces their powerlessness again.

What is more, the patient is also deprived of sunlight, of the earth and the elements of nature, and the stabilizing force of familiarity is also taken away.

Your sense of familiarity with your surroundings, with being at home, can in itself give you a stabilizing force, making you feel comfortable and at ease. This is taken away; you arrive in a completely unfamiliar environment, facing a group of complete strangers and some patients with illnesses similar to yours.

Under your system of beliefs, when the situation is serious, you do indeed have to go to the hospital to some extent.

Under our current medical belief system, when the illness is serious, I have to go to the hospital; where else can I go if not to the hospital?

Here I am not saying that many doctors and nurses do not do their best to help patients heal. Indeed, healing does occur.

There are indeed many who are cured. But it is not because the medical system cured them; rather, even under such a medical system, the patient still manages to recover. That is to say, this person's self-healing ability can still bring about recovery even under such harsh medical conditions -- think about it, perhaps if you had not gone to the hospital, you might have recovered even faster.

In many cases, a patient's faith in the doctor lifts his spirits.

That is, the patient feels that this doctor is an expert who has treated all kinds of difficult and complicated illnesses, and this faith lifts his spirits, makes him feel hopeful, and reawakens his confidence in himself. He feels that with this doctor treating me, I will surely recover soon.

And then the patient becomes full of confidence in his own recovery, and just as animals have a natural healing process, so do you humans.

When you are full of confidence, you will naturally heal yourself. What he is actually saying here is that what truly heals you is your confidence -- your faith in the doctor, your belief, is what heals you.

The Nature of Illness and the Self-Healing of Body and Mind

In your terms, illness often represents an unresolved problem, and this difficult situation contains a challenge intended to lead them toward greater achievement.

This difficult situation is itself a challenge, and it inherently contains the challenge for you to accomplish greater achievements.

Because body and mind work together so well, each one tries to heal the other, and if left alone, this often succeeds. The body has its own confidence in health, which is unconscious as far as you are concerned.

What is called illness is actually an inner difficult situation of yours, and this inner difficult situation actually brings you a challenge. After you overcome this challenge, you will have greater achievements. Since it gives you this challenge, it will not let you be harmed. Your body and mind can heal each other—your psyche can heal your body, and your body can also heal your psyche. If you do not interfere too much, the two of them will cooperate and work very well together, and will heal themselves.

You are a part of the environment, and you form your environment. Yet through your encounters with the physical world, the energy that forms both you and your environment is brought alive within each of you.

That is, the energy that forms your physical and inner being is brought alive within each of us.

The sun will make you smile, and the smile itself sets off pleasant memories, psychic associations, and hormonal activity.

A smile has all these effects. A smile reminds you of your animal nature—your self-healing nature. Just smile often, and that is enough.

The old medicine men worked within a natural environment, and used its great healing abilities, creatively utilizing nature's actual and symbolic properties.

If you have seen that kind of folk shaman, they are all like this.

In your hospitals, however, patients are taken out of their natural environment, and are often denied their animal comfort.

We are most natural and most comfortable in a natural environment. Of course, when we travel and go to scenic spots, are not those scenic spots just very beautiful natural environments? Why do you want to go to such a place? Because you feel comfortable.

He says that in hospitals there is very little involvement with emotion; hospitals do not deal with emotion.

Old people, in their efforts to escape the closetlike little rooms of nursing homes, often show themselves in their way to be more sane than the relatives and society that imprison them.

When old people are sent to nursing homes, they want to get out of those little rooms, and they themselves know very clearly that they must get out of that place. So this is why many old people do not want to go to nursing homes. Do not wave the banner of saying that nursing homes are the best way to care for the elderly, and then send the elderly to nursing homes once they are old. How much the elderly do not want to go to nursing homes—why? They themselves know.

For they intuitively recognize the need for freedom, and feel the lack of that sense of oneness with the land and with the mysterious, which they have been denied.

In nursing homes there is no freedom; they cannot be completely free, nor can they live together with the land, living as in nature.

Small hospitals set on large tracts of land, in which all but the bedridden patients could have freedom, would far surpass your present hospitals.

This kind of hospital is the kind of hospital that truly helps you.

But in the kind of system that you have set up, such an environment is impossible except for the very rich.

In our human world, this kind of environment is only possible for the extremely wealthy to live in such a hospital; otherwise it is impossible. So Seth has also provided a business opportunity—if you work on a system related to medical care, you can establish a new kind of hospital system, and in this new kind of hospital system, using Seth's theories to treat or help them recover is very effective.

Natural Healing in Animals

In many animal groups, a sick animal isolates itself and rests for a period of time. During that time, it is free to seek out the natural environment most beneficial to its health.

It withdraws from group activity, goes off on its own, and runs around looking for certain herbs -- many animals are like this, they find herbs on their own -- or lies in the wet mud by the riverside.

It is often helped by its own kind, yet at no cost.

What he means is that animals can all do this, but for us humans, if we want to return to this state of natural healing, to this kind of environment, it is extremely expensive. Animals are not like that.

If it is killed by its brother, this is not an act of cruelty, but indeed an innate understanding that the life can no longer go on living without pain.

If an animal, no matter how much longer it lives, is bound to suffer, then at that time its own kind may kill it.

This involves a very natural euthanasia. In it, the patient also permits it, and also gives tacit consent.

In your society, in our human society, such a natural death is very difficult. At present, only a few countries in the world have legalized euthanasia. In other countries, if a doctor helps a patient carry out euthanasia, it involves the charge of murder or assisted killing.

Because of your power structures, this kind of thing is almost impossible to advocate.

Although there have always been people calling for the legalization of euthanasia.

Yet no person who has decided to die can be saved by the medical profession.

Actually, when a person inwardly wants to die, medicine cannot save him. In your terms, on a deeper level:

The normal desire to survive is what makes a person sooner or later have to leave his body.

When a person's normal desire to survive instead makes him sooner or later have to leave his body -- when that time comes, the person will know that the great vitality of the psyche is no longer imprisoned by a suffering body. When he dies, he actually enters another healthy body to continue living. This body is no longer workable, so he will not remain in this body any longer. Because for him, the soul is never extinguished, the soul is eternal. So if the body no longer works, just change it -- why must one suffer and insist on staying in this body?

Yet our medical profession here often carefully uses every technical advance to force itself to remain within his body.

We ordinarily use all kinds of minor techniques, such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, electric shock, and so on, to pull dying people back. When the soul and the body separate naturally -- so-called natural separation is natural death -- the medical profession still has to go through the motions of trying to rescue the person. When certain illnesses cannot be treated, then do not keep trying to rescue your loved ones. This is quite interesting.

He has normal built-in mechanisms to prepare himself for death. The chemical interactions involved also make death physically easier to occur. In your terms, this death erupts as an acceleration that easily pushes the person out of the body.

When you die, a series of mechanisms will prepare you to welcome death. The chemical interactions involved make death physically easier to occur, pushing the soul out of the body quickly and easily.

And drugs often hinder this kind of thing.

It turns out that when you use certain drugs, rescue efforts, and so on, these often hinder this natural process of death.

Certain kinds of drugs can indeed be helpful, but the drugs given in your hospitals only anesthetize the consciousness, and it loses its own understanding.

When you are about to die, they are still giving you some drugs, and those drugs are all meant to make you drowsy. If you have had the experience of a family member passing away, you will feel that basically when someone is about to die, they give you something like sleeping pills to keep you sleeping all the time. Because they think that if you sleep, you will not be in pain, right? But when you sleep, those sleeping pills anesthetize your consciousness, and the process of your consciousness separating from the body is carried out in a state where the consciousness is completely anesthetized.

And it inhibits those bodily mechanisms that are meant for an easy transition.

Actually, when the body dies naturally, it is very normal and very easy for the consciousness to leave the body. But it has been dragged out very long by modern medicine, and the consciousness is also made to detach only with great difficulty, and moreover it leaves its body in an anesthetized state, completely dazed.

This session's content is relatively long, and the content is also very rich. The examples and actual cases he gives here are of direct help and personal significance to each of us.

Session 662

Seth began dictating, and he said:

Most criminals, whether in prison or out of it, feel a sense of powerlessness, and out of that arises a resentment.

They use antisocial behavior -- often violent behavior -- to prove their sense of power to themselves. Deep inside them is a profound sense of powerlessness, but they insist on using antisocial, violent behavior to prove their sense of existence, to prove that they have power. They long to be strong and powerful, yet at the same time they believe they lack personal power. They have been conditioned, and further, they have conditioned themselves.

He feels powerless, yet wants to prove he has power, and then deeply feels that he still lacks personal power. Such a contradictory psychology makes them believe they must fight for any benefit. Aggression becomes a method of survival. He tells himself that fighting and attacking for benefit is his method of survival, that he has no choice but to do this.

Since they so believe in the power of others, and in their own powerlessness by comparison, they feel compelled to take action, using almost defensive means, against the greater violence that is about to be inflicted upon them. He feels that a greater violence is about to be inflicted upon them, so they answer violence with violence. This is their inner activity.

His pressure does not come from some person or some things; he feels it is the pressure from the entire social environment, from every aspect of his surroundings. He feels he has no choice, that he can only do this in order to survive. So you see many criminals, when you go interview them in the end, they show no sign of repentance at all. They feel, "I had no choice but to do this. I had no way out. I grew up in such and such an environment..." So they tell you that they were forced, that they had no choice but to adopt such means.

Seth analyzed their inner beliefs:

They feel lonely and isolated, unappreciated, and filled with rage.

In many cases, this rage is often expressed through a steady series of small social offenses. Whether or not they have committed major crimes, the above applies. Some commit major crimes, some just engage in petty mischief, being disobedient from childhood, drifting through the underworld -- it all applies.

Therefore, the expression of aggression that is not understood is of no help to them.

This aggression whose source is not understood, not comprehended -- this series of attacks -- is of no help to him whatsoever.

In the case of criminals and their belief systems:

Aggression is a positive value; it becomes a condition for their survival.

They equate outward aggression with a necessary condition for survival. Many other characteristics that might soften this behavior are reduced to a minimum. He thinks there is no way out, that violence is the only means available. And those characteristics that might be seen by them as dangerous are all the softening characteristics -- that kind of weakness, compassion, love -- he considers all of these as threats to him, as dangerous.

At that moment the phone rang, and Seth said, "Go ahead and answer it, I don't mind." As it turned out, the call lasted nearly an hour, and the session was cut short. This was the shortest session ever. What followed was a feeling of Jane's -- her extrasensory experience came again, and her perception of the surrounding scenery was indescribably beautiful:

I was suddenly caught up in that moment of joy.

This is the feeling that comes after that kind of extrasensory experience opens up. This session was very short, probably the shortest one in her recorded history.

Session 663

May 14, 1973. Even after a break of more than a week, Seth still knew how to pick up right where he had left off, as if there had never been a pause at all. Continuing from what had been left unfinished in the previous session, he said:

You isolate the criminal in an environment.

That is, in prison, or in everyday life, we also isolate them, and in doing so we refuse them any compensation. The compensation he refers to is not only economic, but also social and psychic compensation.

Because the entire structure of the prison, including the bars on its windows, is a constant reminder to the inmate about his condition.

The prison's management model and its daily operating patterns are all a kind of reminder to the inmates—a reminder of what? They reinforce their earlier difficulty. What difficulty? The sense of powerlessness. The reason these criminals committed crimes, the reason they engaged in antisocial behavior, is that deep inside they had a profound sense of powerlessness. They wanted to display a sense of power through a series of antisocial, violent acts, and they would turn this into a necessary condition for their survival. He felt he had no choice but to fight—if he did not fight, the whole of society would crush him and swallow him up. In order to resist the overwhelming violence of society, he had to resist with even greater violence. So the root of it all lay in that initial sense of powerlessness. And putting him in prison only reinforced that sense of powerlessness. In prison, you are absolutely made to feel powerless.

He is denied any normal family life, the entire focus is upon the problem at hand, and all other stimulation is purposely kept to a minimum.

In prison there is no stimulation. You are simply left with nothing to do, locked away.

In their own way, the warden and the guards hold the same set of beliefs as their prisoners.

The warden and the prison guards hold the same beliefs as the inmates. Why? Because both sides emphasize the idea of force and power, and each side believes the other is the enemy. That is exactly the situation in prison—the managers and the managed.

If you are not very familiar with this situation, you can watch a video I made earlier about the prison experiment conducted at Stanford University in the 1970s². He recruited some student volunteers and divided the Stanford students into two groups: one group pretended to be prison guards, and the other pretended to be prisoners. They went to a basement in a teaching building that had been set up to look like a prison, and the professor began the experiment. This is the very famous Stanford prison experiment in psychology³.

The result goes without saying. Within a few days, those guards began tormenting the prisoners—those prisoners were actually their classmates, all of them once top students at Stanford—and the prisoners, under the intense pressure from the guards, also came to believe that they really were prisoners, that they had done something wrong. The experiment was terminated after a few days, around ten days or so, because there had already begun to be very intense violent behavior, and people's lives and safety were beginning to be threatened. The most typical example was that when one student who had pretended to be a prisoner came out, he was even in a daze, feeling that his sentence was not yet up—how could they have released him?

Prison has an enormous impact on a person's psyche. Those guards, who were ordinarily perfectly good, normal people, also resorted to violent measures against their classmates. Many people do not understand why this happened. When the psychologists conducted the experiment, in the end they did not dare continue. They discovered that when people are placed under this particular kind of role choice, they very quickly get pulled into it. There are specialized analyses of that psychological experiment; you can look up the relevant materials.

Here Seth explains the underlying cause of that experiment very clearly: whether prisoners or guards, they all firmly believed in force and power, and they all firmly believed that force and power were supreme. That experiment was also adapted into a film called The Stanford Prison Experiment⁴; you can search for it.

This emphasis on force on both sides, this emphasis on aggression, leads to much of the aggression that occurs in that film, because they all believe the other side is the enemy. Seth's psychological explanation of this can very well illuminate the core point that those psychologists in the film did not fully articulate.

The guards are convinced that the imprisoned are the worst on earth and must be suppressed at all costs.

The prison guards are convinced that the people locked up in prison are all scum, garbage, worthless—that is why they were locked up in the first place. There is nothing to sympathize with in such dregs; they must be suppressed.

Both sides accept that human aggression and violence are methods of survival.

The prisoners and the guards both hold the same idea.

Although in many prisons there have been attempts to provide some vocational training, the experience of the prisoner, the inmate, is often used for unpleasant, harmless work.

Prisons all over the world now have some form of labor training, but this labor training is extremely monotonous, repetitive, dull, and boring. For example, in China there is the pasting together of matchboxes, doing some low-level tasks, or going to work on a farm—that kind of repetitive labor that requires no thought and has no creativity at all.

Nevertheless, both the inmates and the officials take it for granted that those behind bars will, for the most part, return.

The prisoners and the guards who manage them both assume that these so-called criminals will mostly come back, will commit crimes again. Second-time offenders and third-time offenders are very common.

The imprisoned project their personal problems outward onto society, and society returns the gift.

These prisoners project the problems in their lives, their emotional problems, their mood problems, outward onto society. How does society return it? If what he projects onto society is all negative, violent, something that can only be resolved through violence, then what society returns to him is the same thing.

In the same way, people often consider certain characteristics criminal or evil, and try to isolate that part from the other areas of their own activity.

We isolate the part we consider criminal or the part we consider evil from the other areas of our life activity. This often involves power—you believe you lack power—and the attitudes surrounding any one of these patterns. We tell him that certain things cannot be done, that doing them is committing a crime, doing something evil. Then by defining him that way, you make him feel even more powerless, and then he insists on doing exactly those things in order to demonstrate his own power. Our definitions of certain things determine such patterns, and our attitudes toward the patterns determine the final result.

Remember that earlier in this book we mentioned the example of Augustus, in Chapters Six and Eight. Augustus felt powerless, and he viewed power in terms of aggression and violence. So he isolated that part of himself—isolated the aggressive and violent part, considering it to have nothing to do with himself—and then projected it onto a second self. When that second self came into play, that was Augustus Two, and only then could he display power.

His basic concept equated aggression with power, considered aggression and power to be one and the same thing, and so the power to act automatically became the power to attack. Originally this power should have been used to take action in practical life—whether doing work, doing things, accomplishing something, this is all the power to act, and it is the most natural expression of aggression—but because it was not expressed in that direction, it turned into an aggressive power. Augustus Two was extremely irascible, had extraordinary abilities, and felt he was a superman from another planet. Here aggression is also regarded as equivalent to violence.

That was a transference of the problem in a rather unique way.

Just as we discussed earlier, we often project our own problems onto society, turning them into social problems. This includes the patients we talk about now, people who do volunteer work, and so on—all of them have this possibility. Many people are born with this ability to transfer.

Action, and the need to control action, is important to conscious man.

For us normal people, the need for action and the need to control action are of the greatest importance. Therefore Augustus actually created for himself a powerful role from which he could at least temporarily operate, and from which he gained a sense of power. He had to pretend to have amnesia—clearly it was his own design, but he had to pretend as if he did not know what was going on—in order to keep this design hidden from himself.

As long as you equate power with violence, then you will feel it necessary to control the normal aggression in your behavior.

Because you feel that power and violence are the same thing, you suppress anything in your daily behavior that involves normal aggression. We regard power as violence, so we think power is violence, and therefore we usually try to avoid and suppress our own use of violence. And the result of this is that it leads to the creation of an even greater violence.

You will be afraid to act to some degree.

Because you feel that any action carries with it a certain sense of power and aggression.

You will then consider goodness and powerlessness as somewhat synonymous, and regard power as evil.

So-called goodness means doing nothing at all, governing by doing nothing—just not doing anything. We feel that in this world, if you run around making trouble, there is no need to do anything at all; you are better off doing nothing. Doing nothing is actually a kind of goodness; the moment you do anything, you will do it wrong. So many of us have this feeling, treating power as evil, not wanting to face this evil within ourselves. Because you do have an inner need for power; we all have a need for action. So you direct it outward and transfer it to other areas—you tell yourself not to act, you consider such action evil, and so you transfer this power to act outward. Once it is transferred outside, you feel it is no longer you. But in fact the problem has not been solved at all.

As a society, you may project it onto the criminal.

As an individual, we can project it onto Augustus Two, or onto something else. But in society, if we regard society as a person, we will regard this inner sense of power as evil, and so we project it onto criminals. As a nation, we will project it onto other nations, onto hostile nations. As an individual, you may place this power onto an employer, a union, or some other stratum of society—you find this one unpleasant to look at, that one unpleasant to look at, and everyone looks like your adversary.

Whichever you choose, however, you will feel weak in comparison with the power you have projected outward.

You project power onto some object—for example, onto your boss—and compared with that projected power, you will feel weak. Facing your boss you feel weak; facing the union you also feel weak.

Whenever you find yourself in a situation in which you feel weak in comparison with another person or a frightening situation, you must understand that you have encountered your own denied power.

This sentence is very important; we must remember it. That is, in a situation where you feel that a certain person is more oppressive and more authoritative than you—when you are dealing with your boss, or with leaders, officials, government agencies—you feel that the other person or organization is oppressive toward you, and you yourself feel very weak, very powerless. At that moment you must understand that you have encountered your own denied power—you have denied the power that you should rightfully have. In fact this power was always there, but you told yourself: I cannot use force in this place.

For example, in many typical cases of workplace sexual harassment, a boss harasses a female employee. In real life, if another man on the street made a move on you, you would have slapped him long ago, or called the police long ago. But why is it that in the workplace, when your direct supervisor, your boss, your manager makes a move on you, or even insults you, you endure it? Some even go further: they do not even dare tell their husband or boyfriend when they get home, and they keep swallowing their anger. What is happening at that moment? What you are encountering is the power that you should originally have had, but told yourself you should not have. What you need to do is very simple: take back that sense of power, and shatter, break apart that limiting belief that you have no power. You have complete power in this area. When you encounter this kind of thing in the future, there is nothing to worry about, nothing to be afraid of. Directly pick up the weapon of your power: if you need to call the police, call the police; if you need to report it to the authorities, report it; if you need to deal with it, deal with it.

Power does not imply superiority over others.

For example, there is the power to love and the power of loving, both of which imply great action and vitality—an aggressive power of action that has nothing to do with violence. Because in the process of loving, you will radiate your unlimited power of action and aggression, but this aggression is not violent; it does not mean violently attacking anyone. It simply means that in order to love the other person, you need to take a series of actions, and this power of action is itself a manifestation of aggression.

Many people, however, because they are afraid to use their own power of action, regard power as equivalent to aggression, and so they have physical symptoms or encounter unpleasant situations, and this feeling awakens artificial guilt.

Those who most publicly advocate the death penalty feel that they themselves are the ones who really deserve to be executed, to compensate for the great aggression within them that they dare not express.

Most countries have now abolished the death penalty, but in a living environment like mainland China, we feel that the death penalty is perfectly natural and justified. In fact, the number of countries that have abolished the death penalty is far greater than the number of countries that still carry it out. Up to now, if you did a survey, I think the number of people who advocate the death penalty would still be greater than the number who advocate abolishing it. Here Seth says bluntly that those who advocate the death penalty are actually the ones who, in their hearts, deserve to be executed. Because their own aggression cannot be expressed, their aggression is very strong but they dare not express it, so they borrow the seemingly powerful act of executing others to display their own sense of power.

The executed prisoner, or murderer, dies for the evil of every member of society. A magical transference takes place.

What he means is that every person in our society has in their heart their own unspeakable "evil." This so-called "evil" is not actually true evil; rather, it is that he regards his own sense of power as itself a kind of evil, and then he suppresses this sense of power and does not allow it to be released. He projects this aggression outward, and then he sees: these criminals are using violence to attack good people, so they should be executed, they should be shot, they should be hanged or electrocuted. A life for a life, paying debts with money—we consider this perfectly natural and justified.

Seth is analyzing this from a deeper level of belief and from the level of society: in fact, the evil of these people is our own mistaken perception of power and evil, the projection of the evil in our hearts onto others, and through the execution of these people we vent the enormous aggression in each of our hearts. Many of Seth's viewpoints are indeed not accepted or recognized by mainstream society. Whether on medicine, or on matters of crime and criminals, or on schools, many of his viewpoints are completely opposite to many theories in modern society—completely turned upside down. What he talks about are all deeper-level issues, theories that go beyond ordinary human standards of good and evil and find the root of the problem.

If we could truly examine, or seriously study, these universal perceptions of social psychology that he presents, our entire society would become a better place. But before that, you must go through a very painful period of transition, which is that you have to temporarily set aside this standard of good and evil. Many people cannot do this. The thing people attack the most is good and evil. Their sense of good and evil is extremely strong, very, very strong, and they regard it as absolutely correct. They believe that if a person no longer even has a sense of good and evil, then they are not worthy of being human. They regard themselves as the messengers and defenders of good and evil, the embodiment of justice. So we often say: if you can see the good within evil, then you have truly reached a certain level.

Seth continued:

Love is propelled by all the components of natural aggression.

Love is propelled by our power of action; love itself is full of power. It is precisely because we have made this distinction between good and evil that love appears weak, while violence appears strong. The education we received from childhood instilled in us the idea that love is very weak. Love represents tolerance, represents understanding; love cannot resort to violent behavior... This gives people the overall feeling that love itself is powerless. And violence appears very strong.

This is reflected on many levels of your activity.

We often turn the devil into a powerful evil figure, and hatred is regarded as far more efficient than love.

In your society, men are taught to personalize the antisocial attitudes they normally dare not express, in terms of aggression, and the criminal mind expresses the above for them.

Men will take those antisocial thoughts and aggression that they normally have and make them individualized, personalized. And what criminals do is actually to vent or express the antisocial emotions within them. Every man has an antisocial emotion within him, and a drive to disrupt order.

A foreign psychologist once conducted a test like this: he placed some little boys, around ten to twelve or thirteen years old, separately in a large villa. There were cameras in the villa for monitoring, and no adults to supervise. You could do whatever you wanted. There was enough food inside, but it was not ready-made; you had to cook it yourself. He also conducted an experiment with a group of little girls at the same time, to see how they would operate in a similarly completely independent environment.⁵

The results of the observation were very interesting. After the boys went in, in the absence of any authority to supervise them, they would crazily and excitedly destroy everything they could see—tear open the pillows, drag the sheets onto the floor, overturn the tables, destroy everything that could be destroyed. They kept destroying things like this for about two days, until they were completely exhausted and had finished wreaking havoc. Later on, a small number of the little boys were unwilling to join in the chaos and wanted to live a relatively quiet life. The other group of boys regarded these quiet boys as their opponents and attacked them, staying up at night, making noise and causing trouble until twelve or one or two in the morning, not letting the other group sleep.

So how did the other group deal with them? When the noisy boys got tired and went to sleep, at around four or five in the morning, the originally well-behaved boys collected a lot of cold water and poured it on the sleeping boys to wake them up. At that point the two factions started fighting, splitting into two groups and struggling against each other. After about a week, they finally began to face the practical problems of reality. At first they went and ate the junk food—popcorn, cookies, and things like that. Although there was a full set of living utensils, they did not do anything. After a week, many of the boys finally could not stand it anymore, because they really wanted to eat the hamburgers and fries they were used to. Then they sat down and actually cooked a meal: some fried the French fries, some fried the beef patties, some toasted the buns, and they made a meal of hamburgers and fries that they considered very satisfying. That was roughly the process of the boys' world. I have forgotten the specific details; if you are interested you can search for it. There is a special introduction online; it is a really fun experiment.

In the experiment with the girls, you would find that when the girls first went in, they had an innate tendency to beautify and decorate. They would make the rooms very pretty, make small changes and decorations, very warm and cozy. On the surface, everyone seemed to get along very well, introducing themselves to each other—what is your name, where are you from—like one big harmonious family. On the first night they made a sumptuous dinner, dividing the work and cooperating, you do this and I do that, incredibly harmonious. The observers thought, my God, so an all-female society is this warm and harmonious. But after just one day, the situation began to change.

This initial harmony was actually only a surface harmony. Women, toward other women, naturally tend to dislike certain other girls. They would split into various different factions—small cliques, the so-called "besties." The word "bestie" can last a very long time among women, all the way to forty, fifty, sixty years old, and she will still have besties; whereas men, after they pass adolescence, no longer have the concept of "buddies." "Buddies" only appears during adolescence. The time span of women's besties lasts much longer. These dozen or so girls split into several factions, could not stand each other, and the conflicts gradually became more and more obvious. In this process, the girls constantly split and recombined: today these few are friends, tomorrow because of some trivial little matter—a look, a tone of voice, or she spoke to another girl and that girl ignored her—she would feel very uncomfortable staying there and would choose another clique. In this constant splitting, evolving, and infighting among small groups, the society of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls was already beginning to take shape.

Through this experiment, we can observe that even before boys and girls show very obvious gender characteristics, before they show attraction to the opposite sex, there are already strong differences between male and female. The purpose of my mentioning this experiment is to tell you that in boys' society there is a very strong antisocial tendency. You must remember this. If you have boys at home, you must understand that this is their nature, and you should guide and make use of it, releasing their power. You cannot suppress them. If you suppress them, this power will eventually erupt. So when boys play games and so on, parents should not over-restrict them; it is a means of release for them.

In our generation there were no video games. The earliest video games were things like Contra, the Nintendo black-and-white console, and before that we had no games, but we had gang fights. There were street fights and alley brawls, gangs and factions in school, often fighting across schools. This school fought with another school, this grade fought with that grade, and people often got beaten bloody. That violent, antisocial power had to find a way to vent. If there is no means of venting, it will erupt and become some other outlet. Things like games in today's society, although they have their bad side for young people—addiction to games, addiction to the internet—on the other hand they also have certain benefits, because the violent behavior in real life actually decreases. Many young boys who play games nowadays are becoming more and more "effeminate," and that is actually because the violence in the games has already been released, so in life they no longer need to display violence.

Seth continued: many men's antisocial tendencies find expression and release through the outrageous acts committed by those criminals. In a sense, those criminals are committing crimes on their behalf, doing the things they want to do but dare not do. On the one hand they condemn them on the surface, but on the other hand, deep inside, they secretly have an inner identification and expression.

So socially, there is this ambiguous attitude.

Why ambiguous? Because on the surface they condemn criminal behavior, but in their hearts they feel that these people represent some of the ideas they themselves dare not express. In this, the outlaw is often romanticized. Many villainous characters, antisocial people who do not care about conventions, are instead romanticized and idolized. Look at the big Hollywood blockbusters: a basic formula is that it is often a person marginalized by society, someone who is not well regarded, often antisocial, who in the end becomes the great hero who saves the world. In the Western world, where speech is relatively freer, serial killers will have fan groups that openly support them. There was even a report a while ago about a serial killer, someone who specifically killed people, who was pursued by many female fans, and many people were willing to marry him and live with him.

The detective and his criminal are different versions wearing the same mask, following such an idea, and as a result a kind of isolation is formed.

In this, the powerless sick are isolated, the criminals are also locked up together, the elderly are also placed in nursing homes, or in the cultural gathering areas of a certain race together with their own kind. All of this involves the transference of personal problems and the issue of belief systems. This social phenomenon is very common in American society: Black people gather in Black neighborhoods, Mexican people gather in Mexican neighborhoods, White people have White neighborhoods, Asian people have Asian neighborhoods, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Chinese each have their own neighborhoods. These reflect the transference of personal problems and the issue of belief systems. A belief system is the concept of a group belief, a collection of a pile of beliefs. The transference of personal problems means projecting one's own sense of powerlessness outward; one is willing to cluster together to display that sense of power—the inner sense of powerlessness is expressed in this way. Our locking criminals together, locking patients together, locking the elderly together is the same approach, and the mentality is the same: it is all the outward projection of our inner sense of powerlessness.

The criminal represents the aggression that the individual himself fears and has not faced.

Criminals are such a representative, such a symbol. Personally, these fears are hidden by ourselves, while those who openly express them get locked up. If we hide them, we are normal people; if you do not hide them, you become a criminal and get locked up.

Forced confinement of the violent often leads to riots, while the private hiding of normal aggression often brings about psychological riots and the eruption of physical symptoms.

Forced confinement of the violent leads to riots. Many disturbances happen because certain bad people refuse to submit to law enforcement agencies and are then forcefully suppressed. The same was true of the incident involving Black people in America a while back. Apart from the deeper racial issues, in the long-term social struggle between Black people and the police, both sides regarded each other as enemies, and both believed that violence could solve the problem.

That Black man used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill⁶. The store owner called the police, and when the police arrived they wanted to take him away for investigation. Because he already had a prior record, and using counterfeit money in America is a felony, not a simple offense. They wanted to take him away for investigation, but he refused to get in the car, saying he was sick, that he had heart disease, this illness and that illness — this was complete nonsense. Whether you are sick and whether you get in the car are two different matters. If you really cannot get in the car, you can request medical care. But because the police and he were in an adversarial, enemy relationship, when your enemy tells you he is sick, will you go soft? The police had no pity for him whatsoever, thinking he was being slippery, lying, and even trying to evade punishment.

In America, if you openly defy a police officer's orders, the police may use every kind of force available to them. This is the power and authority granted to them by law. Under the American rule-of-law system, judicial power, legislative power, and law enforcement power are independent of one another: the Congress responsible for legislation does not handle law enforcement or the application of law; only the courts have the power to judge whether you are guilty or not, and that is the judicial power. The police only have the power to arrest you, not the power to judge whether you are guilty or not. They arrest you, and in the end whether you are guilty or not is decided in court. In court, the police and you are in a plaintiff-defendant relationship, and you can even sue the police. But during the process of law enforcement, no one may obstruct the police's power to enforce the law. If someone challenges law enforcement authority, the law grants the police the right to use coercion and the right to stop it with violence. In this situation you can see what Seth just said: both sides believed that violence was the primary way to solve this problem.

That police officer forcibly pressed that Black man to the ground, using his knee to press down on his neck for about several minutes. Anyone under strong restraint may have difficulty breathing, and on top of that he may indeed have had some illness, and in the end he was pressed to death. If you look at this man's record, he was not an ordinary innocent civilian; he was a repeat offender who had been in prison several times. In this case, regarding his death, we only see the side of the police using excessive force, but we do not see the side of him resisting law enforcement. In any case, his Black compatriots, in the name of race, began saying that the police were using excessive force and killing the innocent. This matter has deep social causes, but here we are only discussing what Seth said: forced confinement of the violent often leads to riots.

Everyone knows what happened afterward. This kind of rioting broke out nationwide. But were these riots really all caused by that Black man as the origin? The deceased Floyd — his wife and children all called on everyone to protest peacefully and not resort to violence. But it was already useless. In a series of protest activities, there were always some organized people with ulterior motives inciting violent behavior. Once this kind of violent behavior appeared, it actually reflected the long-suppressed anti-social, anti-system forces in many people's hearts, which is why it erupted so intensely.

If in each of us, the hiding and suppression of personal normal aggression will bring about psychological riots or the eruption of physical symptoms. If you always suppress your own normal aggression, normal capacity for action, and normal emotional expression, after a long time it will bring about psychological frenzy and manic eruptions — some people go mad and lose control, some people develop manic symptoms in their behavior or psychological illness, or physical illness.

In all of these cases, few people ever understand the basic issues beneath them. And social segregation — the social segregation of residential areas by race, or putting the elderly in nursing homes, criminals in prisons, and the sick in hospitals — can be said only to accumulate pressure.

Therefore people with the same beliefs are placed in situations that will only perpetuate those basic causes forever.

When people with the same beliefs — the sick, criminals, the elderly, people of the same skin color — are placed in one living circle, will they not forever perpetuate that same cluster of beliefs? When newcomers enter, they will accept these group consciousnesses and group beliefs, so the problem will never improve.

Unconsciously, patients often give away their power to act in a healthy manner to doctors, and doctors also accept this appointment.

Unconsciously, patients give away their power to act in a healthy manner — the healing power of acting on their own in a healthy way — to doctors, and doctors also accept this appointment.

Since they share the same framework of beliefs, it is therefore obvious that doctors need patients as urgently as patients need hospitals.

They are within the same belief system, in a relationship of mutual dependence and mutual need.

Society as you know it does not understand the nature of normal aggression, and treats it as violence. Prisons and the legal institutions of law enforcement need crime and need criminals just as criminals need them, because they operate within the same belief system.

Each one accepts violence as a way of behaving and a method of survival. The police will say: if I do not violently restrain him, what if he uses violence against me? It is that simple.

A couple of days ago I just saw a piece of news. A Black man took a barbecue grill from Walmart, and a school police officer saw it. Abroad, Walmart uses self-checkout and self-payment, relying entirely on self-discipline. The officer discovered that this man took the grill without paying and left, so he chased after him and told him to stop. But the Black man refused to get out of the car. The officer told him to get out, and he would not, and he even started the car and stepped on the gas. The car door was still open, and the officer was standing on the door frame, while the man stepped on the gas to move forward. At that moment the officer drew his gun and fired eleven shots, killing him on the spot.

In America, if you openly resist police law enforcement, the police have the right to use any violent means. A typical characteristic here is exactly what Seth said: because the police also believe that violence must be met with violence. If they do not use violence, they do not know whether the criminal will pull out a gun next. From the first day they enter the police academy, they are indoctrinated with this idea: against people who resist law enforcement, there is only one method, and that is to meet violence with violence.

The training foreign police receive is completely different from that in China. To give a simple example: when foreign police are trained, when they need to draw their guns, their premise is that if they draw the gun at all, they must aim at vital areas and must kill the other party. Unlike in China, where they first shoot at a leg or an arm to stop the crime. American police are not taught that way — not drawing your gun means you have not encountered behavior resisting law enforcement. If he feels you threaten him and he needs to draw his gun to stop your behavior, the first shot and every shot after that is meant to kill you. There are very, very many cases like this.

Many of the examples Seth gives here were said in a society like America. Some actual social situations may not apply in China, but the logic is the same. Whether police or criminals, they both accept violence as the only way of behaving and method of survival. Why are police taught this way? Because the death rate of American police is too high. America is a country where ordinary citizens can legally own guns. There are roughly over three hundred million guns in America⁷, and almost every household has guns — every household has several guns, and it is no exaggeration to say that there is one gun per person. In such a society, police officers' lives are constantly threatened during law enforcement. Law enforcement is a form of survival for them. If they are not careful enough and do not kill the other party, if the other party pulls out a gun, the one who dies may be themselves. So American police are usually very amiable and very nice, but if they discover any behavior or sign that you want to resist law enforcement, they will immediately use extremely violent means against you, without any courtesy at all. So never challenge the law enforcement authority of the police.

Seth makes it very clear here: whether criminals or police, they all treat violence as a way of behaving and a method of survival. Violence first is the first rule they consider.

If you do not understand that you create your own reality, then you may attribute all good to a personalized god, and explain the existence of the devil as those hated, repulsive realities.

You attribute all good to God, and attribute all bad to the actions of the devil. Therefore, just as the church in Western society needs the devil — the church definitely needs the devil — just as it needs God. The church needs God, but the church also needs the devil, just as the police need criminals, criminals need the police, doctors need patients, and patients need doctors. They are all in this kind of relationship, operating within the same belief system.

Natural aggression is simply the power to act.

Our normal, natural human aggression is simply a power to act. It is the source of action. You just let it express and release itself automatically. If you do not let it release, it will turn into something more terrifying.

Your own attitudes toward these issues will let you understand a great deal, and will affect your own personal reality.

Seth says, I am discussing these issues — the so-called issues, namely the problems of doctors, the problems of patients, criminals, police, and the elderly — these seem to have nothing much to do with you: I am not a criminal, I am not a police officer, I am not elderly, and I am not sick. But your attitudes toward these issues will let you understand a great deal, to look at these issues from another angle, and will affect your own personal reality. Your cognition of and attitude toward these issues will affect your own reality.

After reading this, when you see criminals again, you will have a different feeling and cognition. Toward those doctors, patients, the elderly in nursing homes, and those who manage the elderly and abuse them, you will have a completely different cognition and view, no longer as clear-cut as the previous standard of good and evil — where this person is bad and deserves to die. You will see more clearly the underlying causes and the underlying essence of these social phenomena.

If you equate power with youth, then you will isolate the elderly, and transfer onto them the sense of powerlessness that you yourself reject.

If you think only youth has power, you will isolate the elderly. You yourself do not like your own sense of powerlessness, so you will transfer that sense of powerlessness onto the elderly: look at these old people who cannot do anything, who can only stay in nursing homes waiting to die. The nursing home is already the greatest mercy. They no longer have any power, they can no longer do anything, and they are still wasting human resources and food... What is the reason for this? It is because you project your own inner sense of powerlessness onto these old people. You hate your own sense of powerlessness, so you hate these old people. On the surface you pretend to be merciful and proper, saying, "Oh, we take good care of the elderly and build nursing homes," but if you think carefully about how cruel you are: you lock a group of old people together, you do not want them to enter your life, and you do not even want to see them, precisely because you do not want to see your own inner sense of powerlessness.

You discover that one day you too will grow old. You do not dare face this matter, and you do not want to admit it, so you make them disappear from your life. Your life is always full of young people, dancing in clubs every day, dancing, singing, full of power, young, beautiful, and endlessly vibrant. You do not dare look at these old people, because you know that one day you will also grow old. So what do you do? You lock them together and put them in nursing homes.

They also seem to become a threat to your happiness.

Seth's analysis dissects human nature to the point that — in real life it is exactly like this, you just do not dare admit those filthy thoughts in your heart. When you see these old people, you see your own future, so you feel they are an invisible threat to your present happy life, as if a timer has been added to your happy life: you still have thirty years to bounce around, and when one day you reach their age, you will be like them, unable to move easily, needing others to take care of you, with amnesia and unable to remember anything, completely without vitality, and even your favorite sexual ability already lost. You will feel that living like that has no meaning. So you feel they are a threat to your happiness.

If you agree that violence is power, then you will have a great desire for revenge in punishing criminals, because you will view life as a power struggle, and focus your attention on violent behavior.

If you believe that violence is the expression of power, you will have a great desire for revenge in punishing criminals. You will regard a person's life as a kind of struggle, a competitive game, a law of the jungle. You believe resources are limited, and if you want to live well, you must seize a larger share of the limited resources, otherwise you will be marginalized, ruled and oppressed by others, and can only obtain very few resources, or even no resources to survive. You feel that struggling for survival is natural and right.

Using violence to resist, to struggle, or to seize is all normal. The violence I refer to is not only physical violence — for example, tripping up a colleague behind their back, framing a colleague so that they are set up and fired, if they threaten your promotion, all of this counts as a form of violence. In daily life you focus your attention on such violent behavior everywhere, and you feel that only violence can fundamentally solve problems. The reason is that you believe power is violence, and using power is using violence.

Then you will use a great desire for revenge to punish crime. Such a person in society is extremely intolerant of criminals, unable to tolerate even a speck of dust in their eye. His attacks on criminals, his righteous indignation — he is simply the embodiment of justice. He says these criminals should be executed along with their nine generations of relatives, their whole families wiped out. The more he acts this way, the more it shows that his inner tendency toward intense violence is very serious. He simply has no way to express it in daily life, so he transfers it onto the safe angle of punishing criminals — because using violence in this place poses no threat. Others will not only not punish him, they will even praise him, saying, "Look, your coldness toward criminals is coldness toward enemies, and that is kindness toward yourself."

But think carefully: is your coldness toward anyone not coldness? Is your cruelty toward anyone not cruelty? Just because the target changes, can we do cruel things? Whether you are cruel or not, is your own heart not clear about it?

Do you not have some idea in your heart? Whether you are a cruel person or a compassionate person, are you yourself not clear about it?

During the Cultural Revolution, many Red Guards tortured their teachers to death, reported their own relatives, even their own parents, and they felt they were righteous and good, standing on the side of justice, including using belts to beat their own teachers. There are too many such incidents. If you do not understand the Cultural Revolution, you can read books about it. I think one of the better-written books about the Cultural Revolution is Zhang Xianliang's Green Tree⁸. You can go read it. This writer may rarely be mentioned anymore. Green Tree — "green" as in greening, and "tree" as in a big tree. There are many works about the Cultural Revolution, and his writing is relatively plain, not so tragic, and very enjoyable to read. When you read his novels, you have a sense of immersive presence, but from his plain descriptions you can see the cruelty of human nature.

What I want to say, and what Seth wants to say, is the same principle: do not think that because you stand on the moral high ground of justice, it is normal to condemn criminals and treat them with however cruel a method. In fact, the cruelty and ruthlessness in your heart is not one bit less than that of criminals, not one bit lighter. You just do not dare to do it — you are even more cowardly than they are; you do not dare to do it. I am only expressing my feelings about these matters and these people, and you can judge according to your own values.

Seth has already pointed it out. You must remember this sentence: cruelty toward anyone is cruelty. Do not think that because the target is an enemy, you can be cruel to them; that you cannot use this method toward people you like and love, but you can be cruel toward people you hate. You must remember: cruelty toward anyone is cruelty.

You may bring this kind of thing into your personal life. Why are we willing to watch social news and social cases? So-and-so, a little nanny set a fire and burned her employer to death, the Hangzhou nanny arson case⁹, and so on. Who did what again — all social news. Why can this kind of news grab people's attention? Why are people willing to watch this kind of violent social news? The more tragic the better; the more tragic it is, the more people watch. Why are we willing to watch such human tragedies? Have you ever thought about it carefully?

Seth says that this matter will bring you into your personal life and become a topic you discuss with each other after meals. At dinner you say, hey, today I saw a piece of news; the other person says, right, right, right, that person is utterly bad. At that moment the two of you have a consensus, especially a common language, and you discuss it further and attack others further, showing your own moral superiority and moral high ground.

Therefore you will encounter violence, and this will further deepen your conviction. If you firmly believe in this violence, these criminals, and watch this kind of social news every day about bad people and dangerous things, you are very likely to encounter this kind of violence in your life. Because you firmly believe that in this world, violence and power are the way of survival and the code of conduct for solving things. If others want to live better, they will definitely come to rob your money and will definitely harm you, because you also believe this rule: violence is the code of conduct for solving life's fundamental needs.

Belief: Evil Is More Powerful Than Good

If you accept the basic idea that "evil is more powerful than good" -- that evil is what has power, and good itself is powerless -- then your good deeds will accomplish very little because of your own framework. Doing good things has no effect. Why? Because you feel that good is powerless, so you have assigned powerlessness to good. When good and evil need to confront each other, you will feel that good cannot defeat evil.

So we often say, "The Way rises one foot, but the demon rises ten feet." Why do we say this? When a good person's level rises one foot, the bad person's level rises ten feet. Is it not implying to you that the righteous or loving things are powerless, while the evil, demonic force is actually stronger? It is constantly implying this to you. So when you are doing good deeds, you always feel that good deeds can only be done for good people, and doing good deeds for bad people is useless because they are too evil. So you feel a sense of powerlessness, because you have assigned so little power of action to good deeds. You feel that good cannot solve any problems, that trying to reform bad people by doing ideological work on them is pure nonsense and completely useless. For that kind of bad person, you have to use violence against violence, you have to use the death penalty and extreme punishment to deter them, and only that is the way to solve the problem. But good, reform -- that is absolutely useless, like playing the lute to a cow. You firmly believe that this kind of bad person will always be a bad person.

There are also many subordinate beliefs connected to these firm convictions, and these are already deeply held views in your life. They can all function in such a way that you deny yourself the use of your abilities -- deny yourself, saying I do not have this power, I do not have this ability. This in turn leads you to project them outward onto other people. Because you feel you have no power, you say that others should appear more powerful, so you project it onto other people, other places. So this further intensifies your own sense of powerlessness, because I still have no power, and what others can do, I cannot do.

For example, if you accept the idea that knowledge is bad, then as a result of this belief, all your efforts to learn will be futile and fruitless, and will bring you great discomfort. You will not trust any knowledge that comes easily.

You feel that knowledge must be acquired through serious study, and therefore you feel you must pay a price, to atone for the acquisition of any wisdom. You have to give money, give time, give energy, pay something.

Many people say, who would ever think that "knowledge is bad"? How could such a thought exist? That is because you do not understand the development of human society. In many periods of human development, in specific periods and specific regions, knowledge was considered bad. We do not need to go far back; let us just talk about recent times. The slogan "the more knowledge, the more reactionary" was a correct political slogan at the time. Including the idea that intellectuals were the "stinking ninth category," in many historical periods and eras of China, intellectuals were not respected but were the lowest of society. Who was the eighth category? The eighth category was prostitutes. Intellectuals were ranked below prostitutes; in the Yuan dynasty society, people were divided into nine ranks, and intellectuals were the lowest rank¹⁰. So you need to understand that it is not that the idea "knowledge is bad" is so absurd -- no, in different periods of human history, this was a truth of the time.

Even now, many people still feel that knowledge is bad. When I say this, everyone may again say that is abnormal. For example, in a certain period, many people from Wenzhou believed that knowledge was useless. They felt that going to school for so many years and learning so much knowledge was useless; it was better to just finish elementary school, know a few characters, be able to do accounting, and then go into business. This was the fundamental thinking of some Wenzhou people in the early 1980s and early 1990s. Later, when their businesses grew bigger and bigger and their scale expanded more and more, they discovered that without knowledge it really would not work, but by then it was already too late, and they could only place their hopes on the next generation, sending their children abroad to study.

So this is a belief. When you have this belief, whatever you learn is of no use, so you might as well not learn, and naturally you do not learn. It will bring you great discomfort. For example, in ancient China it was the same: "A woman's lack of talent is her virtue"¹¹ -- this phrase has been shouted for thousands of years, not just today. And even today, in Korean society, including those male-dominated societies, a girl learning too much knowledge is not a good thing, and even if she learns it, it is useless. You see many stories like this in Korean dramas, and they also exist in real life: a woman goes abroad to study, receives a better education, attends graduate school, studies abroad for many years, and finally returns home, marries someone, and then becomes a full-time housewife, not working, just staying home taking care of the children every day. Then what was all that knowledge you learned for? Why did you endure so many years of hard study? If you were only going to take care of children, you did not need to go to school for so many years to learn how to take care of children, and what you learned was not about taking care of children anyway.

So this idea that knowledge is useless and that a woman's lack of talent is her virtue is not something that has already passed, as you might imagine. It still exists, and it will only make you feel great discomfort. In a society where a woman's lack of talent is her virtue, if you as a woman are well-read and have learned a great deal of culture, there is nothing comfortable about that for you; you will only feel out of place in that society. At the same time, you will not trust knowledge that comes easily. You feel that knowledge must be acquired through hard work and at a price; if it comes easily, it is not good knowledge, and what is free is not worth trusting. So many people insist on signing up for all kinds of classes, all kinds of training courses -- wealth-building, success studies. For all these classes, the more expensive the fee, the more they want to go, because they feel that expensive things must have value and contain real substance; free things have nothing good in them.

Seth points out: you feel you must pay a price; you feel that knowledge must come at a price -- this is one of your beliefs. He says, what is the essence, the core of this belief? Actually, you believe that knowledge is useless. Many people have never thought of this. Many people think, I spend so much money to learn knowledge, how could I feel that knowledge is useless? This is a very interesting inner belief that many people have never considered.

Fundamentalist Christian interpretations of the Bible often lead to this conclusion.

Fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible lead to this kind of conclusion. Therefore, the pursuit of knowledge itself -- which is an innate biological drive -- becomes a taboo activity. This idea that "knowledge is bad" exists not only in the East but also in the West. Many Western doctrines prohibit you from learning new knowledge; they believe that one Bible is already sufficient, that the Bible already contains everything in the world, and you do not need to learn anything else. Everything else is heretical doctrine, things that tempt you, things of the devil; as long as it contradicts the Bible in the slightest, it is absolutely reactionary.

So you must project wisdom onto other people, because you feel that knowledge is bad. And this pursuit of knowledge is itself our innate biological drive, because our consciousness has a most basic characteristic: it is inherently curious. This is something you must remember. Consciousness is the most fundamental thing that composes all things in the world; the most basic is units of consciousness, which then form EE units, and EE units then form particles, and particles then form atoms and molecules, and so on in a series, until eventually we form our own consciousness. Consciousness is the foundation of this society, and the essence of consciousness is curiosity and a love of learning. So Seth says it is itself a biological, primitive thing. We love to learn, we love to acquire knowledge.

Many people ask, why do so many people study spiritual things? When they have no worries about food and clothing, when their basic needs are met, why do they not go learn other skills, how to make money, such as learning stock trading or investing -- why do they dive headfirst into spiritual study? Because the pursuit of knowledge is an innate, biological instinct; it does not require you to pay an expensive price or any kind of cost. Everyone inherently has this thirst for knowledge.

In religious groups, Christianity holds that you should not have wisdom, that your knowledge should be limited to the scope of the Bible. So you will project wisdom onto other people, while excluding it from yourself. You feel that you are not qualified, that you do not have the ability to acquire knowledge, that you do not have this skill or this capacity. You will face a dilemma in terms of personal value; you feel that you are not smart enough, not wise enough. What is the core? The core is that you feel knowledge is not good. Since knowledge was never a good thing to begin with, then is it not better that I do not have it?

So many people have this kind of problem in real life: when you tell them about some new ideas, some new knowledge, they say, ah, I cannot do it, do not explain it to me, I cannot learn it, I do not want to learn it; the knowledge I have is just enough for me to survive, enough for my current job, enough to solve my current problems. Because deep in their hearts there is a core belief: knowledge is not good. This is something many people have never thought of.

Religion and the Projection of Aggression

For a long time, monks, priests, and religious organizations have become separated from the rest of humanity.

These religious leaders and religious groups have separated themselves from normal human beings. Why? They live in temples, churches, monasteries. They have their own places, their own venues for activities, and they no longer have contact with normal human society, or such contact has become extremely rare.

They have alternately been revered and feared.

Over the course of history, they have at times been revered, at times been feared. They have often been loved and hated; their knowledge was envied, yet people looked upon them with superstitious, awestruck eyes. This is a process that has occurred many times in history.

Voodoo practitioners and healers -- that is, these voodoo practitioners who solve problems with incantations, and these healing people, these witch doctors and priests -- were all revered, but because of the power and knowledge involved, they were also regarded with a certain kind of terror.

Healing others or cursing others -- that is what voodoo practitioners often do. On the one hand they heal others, and on the other hand they can curse others. For many people, this implies a kind of power of knowledge -- being able to cure others, or being able to cast a curse on others, is a mysterious power, a power of knowledge.

And for those devout people who have been seized by Christian doctrine, who have been persuaded by Christian doctrine, the power of religion is a frightening thing. Many people join a religion not because they truly want to believe in it; they join out of fear -- afraid that if they do not believe they will be punished, and also afraid that if everyone around them believes and they are excluded, it would be as if they had not joined the great organization of humanity. Imagine if you lived in a community where all your neighbors believed in a certain religion, and you were the only one who did not believe -- what would that feel like? They have their own organization, their own rituals, their own activities, their own group, and you are excluded from that group every day. I do not know how long you could hold out. So this is a fundamental reason why in certain regions and certain societies, some religions can spread throughout the whole society -- many people join out of fear of the power of that religion.

Normal aggression was considered evil, and therefore was isolated within the self, but it could be seen everywhere outside.

You yourself actually want to attack this religion, but you do not dare, you are afraid. Then you take this normal expression -- your aversion to Christianity or to other religions, your disgust -- and you suppress it, you tell yourself not to express it. At this point you project it outward, onto those criminals, those bad things, those people who disrupt society, or those who oppose religion, and you condemn them. Actually, you are afraid of discovering that power within yourself, and then you tell yourself: I have no power, power is bad, power is violence, I cannot have power. But you also long for that power, so you project it outward and let those criminals act on your behalf, exercising the power you wanted to use but did not. Because your cognition is wrong -- you believe that power equals violence. That is your cognitive error.

Some people create artificial divisions within their lives, in which certain areas are safe for action, but other areas are dangerous.

For example, if you believe that wealth is evil, that will automatically kill any ability that could bring you wealth. Those talents in you that would otherwise be accepted as good are suppressed simply because their achievements might lead to financial success. This idea that "wealth is bad, wealth is evil" has appeared in many periods of history, both in China and abroad. The richer you are, the worse you are; only the poor are holy, pure, and noble, while the rich are all filthy. So in that kind of situation, many people suppress their innate ability to make money. Therefore, people in a certain region become poorer and poorer, and there is a certain group belief in society behind that.

Your beliefs are extremely important in how you handle the power of personal action. In your use of this power, do you perceive power itself as destructive or creative? If you think power is good, then you will make good use of it; if you think power itself is bad, then it is very dangerous -- you will suppress it. Your private use of energy brings your own power support into an intimate relationship.

Healing involves energy, great natural and aggressive thrusts, growth, and the focused concentration of vitality.

The matter of healing itself involves great, natural, aggressive thrusts of energy, growth, and the focused concentration of vitality. Healing itself requires the use of power, and great natural power at that. If you do not know how to use this power, how can you heal yourself?

Seth has come full circle to tell you why he brought up these criminals, these sick people, these people at the bottom of society. Who did he bring up? The sick, the elderly, the criminals. These are the most marginalized, the lowest people in our human society. Seth brought them up and analyzed them to tell you: they are all outward projections of our inner unwillingness to use our own power. Where does our inner sense of powerlessness come from? It comes from the fact that we think power is bad, we tell ourselves not to use power, and that is why we feel powerless inside. But in actual life, whether it is healing your own body, or achieving something, or making yourself wealthier, or doing anything you want to do, it all requires your power to come forth. Without power, how can you act?

What he wants to say here is that you must change your fundamental belief -- turn around the belief that "power itself is violence" -- only then can you solve the problem. So all those earlier examples of the elderly, the criminals, and the sick were meant to tell you: the core social phenomenon underlying them lies in the sense of powerlessness within you.

The more powerless you feel, the less able you are to use your own healing abilities.

The more powerless you feel, the less able you are to heal yourself, and then you are forced to project outward onto a doctor, a healer, any external force. You go to a doctor, find a shaman, find a quack, find folk remedies, find anything external, because you feel you have no way to solve it yourself, you cannot heal yourself.

If your faith in the doctor works, and your symptoms improve, and your body is relieved, nevertheless your faith in yourself has been further undermined.

When you go to a doctor and get yourself cured, it seems your body feels better and the symptoms are gone, but your confidence has been undermined. Because you feel you are powerless to solve the illness in your own body, and you must rely on outside doctors or other healers to treat you.

If you do not make an effective effort to deal with your own problems, those symptoms will reappear in a new form.

This doctor cures your current symptoms, and a couple of days later they will reappear in the form of new symptoms. The same process will begin all over again. So many people get sick, get better, get sick again. You may lose faith in one particular doctor, but still maintain faith in the entire medical establishment -- thinking this doctor's skill is not good enough, so you switch doctors, going from one doctor to another, still believing in the medical system.

But the body has its own integrity. Illness is often just a natural signal of imbalance. The body is a whole, and illness is a message telling you: your body has lost its balance. You should listen to this message, and then make some internal adjustments accordingly.

When this readjustment is always made from the outside, the body's natural consistency is endangered.

When you begin to readjust according to the signal the illness gives you, but instead of adjusting from within you adjust through external means, the natural consistency of your innate mind-body self-healing is endangered. You cannot heal yourself, and the close relationship between you and your mind is also confused. The body and the mind are originally closely related; the body can heal the mind, and the mind can heal the body. The two can heal each other, but you have thrown their close relationship into disorder.

What is more, the natural healing forces become dulled. The natural triggers that should respond to inner stimuli and set reactions in motion are instead activated by external means.

Your natural power becomes dulled. The self-healing mechanism that should be triggered by the natural inner stimuli now has to be activated by external means. So this person's confidence is increasingly transferred to an external force, because he believes the source of power is outside. Actually, this person himself can activate his inner power; he has the ability of the inner self to activate it, but because he has denied this ability, he seeks it externally, letting the outside activate this power for him.

When he activates this power through external means, he hands over the power of healing to the outside. For example, when he believes that this illness can only be cured by taking a certain medicine, that medicine is an external force. He does not believe he has an inner healing ability; he believes only by taking this medicine can he get better. So this is transferring his confidence more and more to an external force.

This usually means that the necessary time for inner self-questioning dialogue has not been given.

That is, you have not asked yourself: do I really need this external help, or can the inner self solve the problem directly on its own?

The self-healing that could have occurred is instead brought about by another person's faith.

The self-healing that you could have initiated on your own is instead brought to you by another person. The so-called doctors, the so-called medical system, the so-called healers -- they merely activate your inner confidence, replacing your inner healing function. But has the problem been solved? No, it has not, because you have projected it outward. So its effectiveness cannot last very long; it works in the short term, but the fundamental problem is not solved. The fundamental issue is your inner belief, your cognition of power, your recognition of your inner power.

Here I am speaking mainly of Western culture. In some other cultures, especially in what you consider the past, the witch doctor was accepted by all as operating within a natural range.

In ancient times, witch doctors were accepted by everyone, but not in modern times. Although the witch doctor activated the natural forces for those who seemed temporarily unable to move, he then returned the patient to his own source. After he called upon the natural external forces, he handed the patient back to himself, letting him recover and heal on his own, and reawakened his buried sense of power -- he became sick because he had no power, but it is not that he had no power; it was buried, and the witch doctor awakened it. That is the source of physical life, which is the inner power, which is the feeling of power and action. I have power, I can act. If a person feels he has power and can act, he will not become too seriously ill; when a person truly feels powerless, he will die. Remember this. When you do not understand why some people commit suicide, one of the reasons lies here.

Again, the point of power is in the present, and where your nonphysical self meets physical reality, the mere recognition of that fact can revitalize your life.

You must understand that your point of power is in the present. The present point is where your soul and your own physical body meet, that is, the present moment when your consciousness arises. The recognition of the present -- at this point, it is your point of power. This point can change all of your past, present, and future, including your past reincarnations and probable selves. The greatness of your power cannot be described in words, and yet you have such great power but believe you are powerless -- that is a problem of your own cognition. Seth says, when you have a deep recognition of this point, you will re-recognize and revitalize your life, because you have found the point from which to exert force, and you have taken back the power that was always yours.

The Learning and Evolution of Consciousness

In your terms, as a species, you are in a state of evolution. Part of this experience involves a natural fascination with the external world. You are developing qualities of consciousness that, in their own way, are unique to you, just as your environment is also unique. A strong focus is necessary.

We are developing certain features and characteristics of our consciousness. In terms of those qualities, the special abilities of consciousness are unique to you humans, and your environment is also unique. Since you are involved in a learning process, all the innate components of this environment will be explored.

Yet in this process, in the dream state, you always maintain contact with the reality that springs forth from physical experience. As you come to understand time, you can ultimately merge your inner understanding with the physical self, and on a conscious basis form your own world.

When you come to understand the nature of time—the nature of time is simultaneity—it can merge your innermost core understanding, the understanding of the soul, with your own physical self, and form your own world through the filter of your conscious beliefs. Things like my books are precisely meant to help you do that. This book is for exactly that purpose.

The more you become involved with the complex physical organism, the more energy you project outward, and the more fascinated you become with external manifestations.

The more you become involved with the physical body, the more energy you project outward, and the more you become fascinated by the manifestations of the external world. In itself, this is a natural way of learning. You become fascinated by the external world, and then you begin to learn about it and understand it—that is the natural way of learning.

Your inner life is translated into physical reality, and when you perceive it and relate to it, you first begin to question the source of the physical body, and then question the meaning of this physical body.

Your inner life is the life of your multidimensional soul, and it is translated into physical reality—our physical body. When you perceive this physical body and relate to it, you will question where this body comes from and what the meaning of its existence is. These are the first two questions you will consider. Where does your physical body come from? It is born from your beliefs, emerging from the unconscious you, from the greater you, from multidimensional reality. What is its meaning? It is to experience this material world, to experience and create as richly as possible, to the greatest extent possible.

This will bring you back to yourself, and to a recognition of your own abilities.

What kind of abilities? You created even your own body—that is your ability. Right now we create unconsciously. One day your species will create consciously. Right now, when you have a desire, the inner self has already created it—created it in another parallel world, and then projected it into this reality of ours. That is, it first completes the projection in the inner world, and then projects it into the outer world. But this creative process is accomplished unconsciously by your inner self. We do not know how it is accomplished; we only need to know the mechanism by which it is accomplished.

Until one day, you humans will create consciously, creating whatever you want to create. Right now we create by consciously guiding the unconscious. Seth tells us that through the conscious belief system, we can touch, activate, and trigger that unconscious energy, that mechanism, and then let it manifest. One day you will be able to skip this process entirely and manifest consciously and directly.

The infinite abilities of consciousness become personalized, focused upon a particular reality, and then expand.

The abilities of consciousness are inherently infinite, but they become individualized, with personal characteristics for each person. Everyone's focus becomes different; you focus on a particular environment, and then expand. Your own worldly creations enhance the very abilities you used to become them—the things we create in the world enhance our ability to create them in the first place. When we create something, that thing itself can enhance our ability to create it again—it in turn elevates our abilities. In the process of creating, we are elevating our own conscious creative abilities.

You learn through your creations, and the physically oriented mind is guided to use the greatest sources of power and energy, along with the infinite aspects of creativity, so that each physical day is indeed absolutely unique.

Every day is unique, and every day creates a one-of-a-kind world. So you cannot expect any part of the environment to remain unchanged; it is always changing. The condition of your body is also constantly in a state of flux.

In your social structures, from the largest metropolis to the smallest farm, from the wealthiest districts to the poorest slums, from monasteries to prisons, all reflect the inner conditions of individual lives, as well as the personal beliefs held by each of you.

Our personal beliefs are projected outward into society, forming the current state of our society. If you trace it back to its source, its roots lie in the personal beliefs held by each of us. So when you change your own personal beliefs, you are changing the world you live in.

If you correctly apply the point of power, as described in Chapter 15, Session 657, through the intersection of feeling with your physical body, nonphysical energy is translated into effective personal power.

As described in Chapter 15, how to use your own point of power. When you can use it correctly, through the intersection of you and your physical body, nonphysical energy becomes a very effective personal energy. You can consciously and purposefully use that power to change your personal experience.

Previously you were creating unconsciously; now you are being asked to create consciously and purposefully. Thus at least partially changing the structure of society. Changing personal beliefs will change the structure of society. This practice of changing the use of the point of power and changing the power of the present moment can help the evolution of your consciousness, and will also help you in ways you do not expect.

The tacit acceptance of your own power will automatically cause it to flow through your experience.

When you have this tacit acceptance of your inner power—saying I have this power, I have the power to exert force from this point of power—this power will automatically flow through your experience. All of your experiences become powerful, and all of your power becomes active, powerful, and actively chosen. It will also activate your dream life, even making your dreams become conscious, and provide additional, helpful impetus to waking reality. In dreams, it provides helpful impetus to your normal daytime physical life, and the dreams become meaningful to you. You no longer need to transfer your sense of power to others, to doctors, to prison guards, or project your sense of power onto criminals—none of that is necessary anymore.

However, all the exercises given to you earlier in this book are prerequisites.

Earlier he gave several exercises about the point of power, about how to hypnotize yourself while awake, that five-to-ten-minute daily meditation exercise. Those basic exercises are all prerequisites; they are necessary. Only then will you understand how to use the point of power. Only after doing those exercises will you know how to use your point of power.

The recognition of personal emotions, and the item-by-item understanding of beliefs, both expand your knowledge of yourself.

The recognition of your personal emotions that he mentioned earlier—love, hate, and so on, including your awareness of certain issues in society—these recognitions, these understandings of good and evil, are all emotional. These recognitions of personal emotions, and the item-by-item understanding of beliefs—he analyzed beliefs one by one through the elderly, the sick, people trying to lose weight, and so on—all of these are expanding your knowledge of yourself. When he is analyzing others, he is expanding your awareness and understanding of yourself.

For example, if you hate your parents, you cannot use the point of power to tell yourself that you love them, and the earlier exercises will help you understand the reasons for that hatred.

Many people say, how can anyone hate their own parents? That is because you have never encountered it. In real life, there are many people who hate their parents. If you hate your parents, you cannot use the point of power to tell yourself that you love them—it is useless, because the emotion of hating them is real. But you can use such an exercise to help you understand the reasons for that hatred: why you hate them, and what exactly it is about them that you hate.

You cannot use the point of power to control others—remember this firmly. Your point of power is only effective on yourself. Do not use what you have learned to control others. Because your own beliefs will automatically trap you, completely preventing you from acting. Your own belief is: your point of power can change your perception of the present, the past, and the future—how could you possibly change others? If you believe you have the point of power in the present, you believe that this point of power is only effective on yourself. If other people's points of power are effective on themselves, how could you control others? If you could control others, could others also control you? If others could control you, then how could you recognize that your own present point of power is the most effective and that you can fully control it yourself? This is inherently contradictory. This belief tells you: this belief itself will trap you. So you should never think about using your point of power to control others—it is impossible.

Nevertheless, you must become aware of your power, and believe that you deserve it.

You only need to become aware of your own power; you do not need to worry about others. You must believe that you have this sense of power. If you say, how can anyone feel they do not deserve it? Yes, there are people who feel they do not deserve it. If you carefully study Maslow's hierarchy of basic human needs¹², you will find that the final level is very interesting. When humans pass through Maslow's initial levels—survival needs, safety needs, and other basic needs—and reach the highest state of need, after achieving self-actualization, you will discover a characteristic: do humans all feel they deserve it? Do I deserve to be this excellent? Do I deserve to be this perfect? Do I deserve to be this powerful? Many people do not understand. Look carefully at Maslow, and you will know that at the highest level of human needs, you will feel "I do not deserve it." Of course, you may not feel this point yet right now.

If one day you imagine this: suppose you now become a star admired by millions, but you feel that you have only done the most basic work of a basic actor, just acted in a few popular dramas and popular movies, yet now people look at you like a superstar. At this time, you will feel that you do not deserve it, because you feel that your awareness, your level of thinking, your knowledge, your abilities—none of them match your current status. What Seth wants to tell you is: you definitely do deserve it, you definitely deserve the power of this point of power, and you are fully qualified and fully capable of possessing it.

Many of the earlier chapters in this book were written precisely to convince you of your own worth.

Many of the earlier chapters are all about convincing you: you have this worth, you have this ability, you have this capability to use your point of power.

You were told to experience your emotions rather than deny them.

Do not be afraid of emotions. The point of power is in your hands, right in the present—why should you be afraid of these emotions and feelings? You feel that you have no power, so you are afraid of being led around by emotions, afraid of being overwhelmed by emotions and feelings. When you feel that you are powerful, and that the point of power is within your control, then go ahead and fully experience the emotion, rather than denying it.

Therefore, at any time, do not use the point of power in an attempt to deny the reality of your emotions.

Remember this firmly. Do not, after learning about the point of power, use it to deny the reality of your emotions.

When you understand the nature of natural hypnosis, you will no longer feel the need to generate new negative emotions, and the burden of your repression will be lightened.

The nature of natural hypnosis is that your own beliefs are hypnotizing you. In your daily life, you are hypnotizing yourself with your own beliefs. When you understand this, you will no longer need to generate new negative emotions. Because when you trust yourself more, you naturally express your emotions, because you believe you have the ability to change them. When you switch to a different way of self-hypnosis, you can feel whatever emotion you want to feel. You no longer need to feel those negative things, because previously you felt that negative emotions came uncontrollably, and after they came, you repressed them. And in the process of repression, an explosion would eventually occur.

And their repression will not bring about explosive reactions; they will come and go, and the channels of power will be opened more clearly.

These emotions and feelings will come and go, and the channels of inner power will be opened completely and clearly.

This attention to the stream of your own consciousness is extremely important.

The stream of consciousness is fundamental; it requires a stable stream of consciousness. Whatever kind of stable stream of consciousness you need will manifest whatever kind of result you want. So you must pay attention to maintaining a relatively stable stream of consciousness, and this stream of consciousness must be the one that corresponds to the result you want.

This alone will help you see in which areas you deny impulses or cause yourself a sense of powerlessness.

When you begin to pay attention to and notice your stream of consciousness, wherever there is obstruction or resistance, you will know that place is where there is a command making yourself powerless. That place is where you are stuck, and it is also the place you need to resolve. The so-called command is to remove the belief that commands yourself to be powerless, to regain a sense of power and strength, and only then can your stream of consciousness flow smoothly, naturally, continuously, and stably.

The exercises of the point of power are meant to familiarize you with your own energy and your ability to direct it.

Do you remember the point of power exercise? It is sitting there with your eyes open, looking at your surrounding environment, and then wherever something does not look right, changing it—that kind of ability. Do this exercise with the sense of power of the point of power, to help you reclaim your power and reclaim your energy. Then the natural hypnosis exercise, the five-to-ten-minute daily one, is to allow you to be more efficient in directing and focusing your power. The first one trains you to believe that you have this energy, and to learn the ability to direct it; the second one, the natural hypnosis exercise, makes you more efficient in focusing your power. In other words, using the terminology from Abraham's The User's Manual for the Human Robot¹³, it is to help you calibrate, to calibrate with your inner self and stay aligned—that is the natural hypnosis method.

Each person must do it from his or her own point of reality.

Remember firmly, each person must do it from their own point of reality; there is no other way. So some people say, I am worried about my son; I want to use my method during meditation to change my son, to make him more motivated if he is not motivated enough—well, are you not clearly using it in the wrong place? You can only change yourself; how can you change your son? You cannot change him.

If you feel full of anger, then do not say, "I am filled with peace."

Do not deceive yourself, saying, I was originally very angry, and then I say I am filled with peace, and expect good results—I am peaceful, I have no anger. How is that possible? Because you are not calibrated with your inner self, not staying aligned. Doing so only covers up your feelings; you cover up the feeling of anger and suppress your energy and power. When you are clearly angry and still say you are not angry, you are suppressing your energy and power.

If you are very angry, here is a specific method: if you are truly very angry and furious, hit a pillow, experience the anger, and let it release—but do not release it on other people; do not hit others. Release the anger until you are exhausted. If you are still angry, keep hitting, until you cannot hit anymore.

If you honestly do this, remember firmly: if you honestly face your true emotions, let emotions come and let emotions go, vent when you are angry, release the emotion when you are depressed, cry freely when you want to cry—if you honestly do this, you will understand the reasons for your rage. After you finish hitting, after you are exhausted, you will know why you were angry, why you were furious. The reason is often very obvious, and only you can know it; you simply did not want to face it. You did not want to face the reason that made you furious; it was hidden by you. But as you go along with the emotion, the emotion will lead you to the belief hidden behind it.

In almost all such instances, your emotions represent a sense of powerlessness in themselves.

You lose your temper because of a sense of powerlessness; anger is a manifestation of a sense of powerlessness. Then you give your power away to a situation or an individual—you have given your power to someone else. You feel, I have no way to resist; it is my leader, it is my boss. You give your power to a situation or to a certain person, and by comparison, you feel that your own efforts are ineffective: no matter how hard I strive, it all depends on the boss's appreciation; if the boss does not appreciate me, no matter how hard I work, it is useless. That is the source of your sense of powerlessness.

Then use the point of power, and feel that your energy surges forth through your experience.

Through the practice of the point of power, you must feel where your energy comes from—it emerges from your everyday experiences in daily life, from your life experiences, and in every specific, small, and subtle matter in your present moment, it manifests its sense of power and strength.

The recognition of your own power will release you from all fear.

When you honestly do this, you will release yourself from all fear, and also release yourself from all anger. When you release yourself from fear, anger will also disappear. Much of the time, you get angry because of fear.

Session 664

Personal Reality and Social Reality (Session 664)

Let's look at the next section. The next section is relatively short, so we'll cover it all in one go, which is Session 664 of the book, the session from Monday, May 21, 1973. This session is very short.

Between each person and his or her society, there is a constant give-and-take.

Remember, between each person and his or her society, there is a constant process of giving and taking.

The distinctions and characteristics of any given civilization will be determined by the people within it as outward representatives.

The distinctions and characteristics of any given civilization are determined by the people living within it as outward, perfect outward representatives. It's like how these people view their relationships, and how they view themselves. That's what people are, in a sense -- how they view their relationships with one another and how they view themselves. It is such people who serve as perfect representatives of a civilization and a race. In other words, how do people view Chinese civilization as an important component of world civilization? Mainly through each of us as representatives of that civilization. They may not have a complete understanding of Chinese civilization, but when they see a Chinese person, they know: this is a representative of Chinese civilization.

The exterior world is a replica of the personal world. Achievements, wars, problems, and public facilities are all after the event.

Your exterior world is a replica of your inner personal world. What does "after the event" mean? It means after your inner world, your inner mental world. They are outer actions that exist within the inner. What does that mean? These things -- the so-called achievements: human achievements, personal achievements, social achievements, group achievements, wars, problems, public facilities, hospitals, schools, kindergartens, parks -- all of these are after the event. After what event? After your inner psychic events, after your personal inner events, only then are they projected outward. They are outer actions that exist within the inner. So first there are inner events in action.

In the same way that water can turn into ice under certain conditions, inner events can appear in physical reality in forms quite different from their original ones.

When these inner events of yours manifest into outer events, they appear in different forms. For example, your inner sense of powerlessness might project outward as antisocial violent behavior. It's not like what you might imagine: that your powerlessness projected outward would also be a kind of powerlessness, doing nothing. Sometimes it's not like that. It manifests in a completely different way, a different form. You must remember this: it manifests in a form different from its original one, and you need to be able to recognize it.

As animals, you are part of nature, and your thoughts, emotions, and beliefs become physical, objectively perceived phenomena.

You are part of nature. Then your thoughts, emotions, and beliefs all become physical -- they become material existence, they become the environment that exists around us, for us to experience, and only then can they be objectively perceived by us as phenomena. The objective phenomena of our outer senses are the outer manifestations of our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. If you understand this sentence this way, that is what it means.

As natural as water turning into ice, or a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.

Water and ice -- if you look only at their outer forms, they seem like two completely different things, but their essence is one and the same thing. So your inner world may be the same thing, projected outward, and its essence is the same, but it looks as different as water and ice -- just like a caterpillar eventually turning into a butterfly. The essence is still that caterpillar, but it has become a butterfly, and you think the two are completely different, yet their essence is the same. They are that natural.

You do not form the structure of your civilization and the facilities of your society only through the transference of beliefs, thoughts, and emotions.

Where do our thoughts and emotions transfer to? Outward -- transferred to our outer world, our social phenomena, social organizations, the surrounding outer world. We transfer beliefs, thoughts, and emotions outward into the structure of our civilization and the facilities of our society, such as hospitals, schools, nursing homes.

But in the natural exchange, you also help the physical environment itself quite intimately.

You also help the physical world on quite intimate levels. What is this physical world itself doing? Psychic construction -- you are helping it build things. You are using your psyche to help the physical world construct.

With all of its great, violent changes, there is seasonal stability.

Our outer physical world has continuous, earth-moving, sea-filling kinds of changes, and it also has a certain periodic stability. During certain periods it is very stable, and perhaps during certain periods there will be cataclysms, mountains crumbling and seas shifting.

Witch doctors can do a rain dance because they understand the innate connections that exist within all parts of nature.

In ancient times we often had rituals for praying for rain. The sacrifices of the past were all for supplicating nature -- praying for rain and the like. Because they knew the innate connections within all parts of nature.

You are taught to believe that faith can move mountains, yet many people instead find it extremely difficult to accept their relationship with their environment.

Your beliefs can move mountains. The ancient Chinese fable "The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains"¹⁴ is exactly this meaning. Yet many of you find it extremely difficult to accept your relationship with your environment. You don't think you are one with nature; you think you are a higher being transcending nature.

Your beliefs are often contrary to your desires, and your beliefs cause wars.

Your beliefs and your desires are often contrary to each other. You must remember this. Many people say, no one wants war, no one wants disease, no one wants plague, so how do these things come about in reality? So he tells you: between your beliefs and your desires, very often, most of the time, they are contrary.

Your emotions represent the inner reality behind what you consider to be purely natural phenomena, such as the weather.

You think your emotions are just emotions, but they also represent -- what you consider to be purely natural phenomena, such as the weather. We think weather is a very objective natural phenomenon -- what lies behind it? It is your emotions.

Natural disasters, such as earthquakes and floods, are not perpetuated because some element of nature is at war with other parts.

These natural disasters -- earthquakes and floods -- are only temporary. They are not perpetuated forever, nor are they caused by some elements of nature fighting against themselves, nature against nature, forever in conflict, leading to these natural disasters. There will be temporary conflicts, but not permanent ones.

Your emotions have as much natural validity as the tides.

Your emotions can rise and fall, high and low, just like the tides of nature coming and going, and they have their own attraction. The tides and your emotions are the same; they both have their own attraction.

The mind can indeed move objects. In a seance, under controlled conditions, manipulating a ring is only one of the simplest demonstrations of the great interactive ability between mind and matter.

What does this mean? In the early Seth sessions, in the first two chapters, the first two sessions, Jane and Rob did not believe in Seth's real existence. So they said to Seth, can you move the ring on my table? Jane took off her own ring and placed it on the table, saying, move it for me. Seth tried for a long time and did not succeed; there was not the slightest movement. A few days later, they asked Seth to try again, and this time it still did not succeed. At that point Jane and Rob were somewhat -- not suspicious of him, but suspicious that it seemed he didn't have much ability, since he couldn't even move this tiny ring. So Seth explains this here.

But later, in the ESP class sessions, Seth did perform several demonstrations of so-called magical power. For example, once he made a table dance -- in the ESP class, he made a table weighing dozens of pounds levitate and dance in the room. He had everyone form a circle, had one person touch the table, and the others link together in a chain with that person, and then the table began dancing wildly under that person's hand. If you look at the early sessions and the ESP class materials, there are descriptions of this table. And he also had other displays, such as making one of Jane's hands become transparent, like an animal's hand, wet and dripping -- he said this was a manifestation of Jane in another space-time, a manifestation of an extraterrestrial being in another parallel world. Later, as Seth's abilities grew stronger and he became more capable of controlling and manipulating our physical world, he made several demonstrations. Seth brings up this story again to tell you: the mind can indeed manipulate and move objects, but it requires certain controlled conditions, and this is only one of the simplest demonstrations.

Each of you participates in every storm.

Every storm in the natural environment, every climate condition in the natural environment, is intimately connected with each of us. Every spring of psychic energy, and every creation of floods, earthquakes, and summer rainstorms, is intimately connected with each of us. Here he emphasizes the important role of personal reality in climate.

A war is a natural event brought about when emotions and beliefs interact on one level.

This is easy for us to understand. We all feel we are righteous; when we go to war, we all feel we have been bullied, our justice has been challenged, or we need to teach the other side a lesson for their unjust behavior, and then we start a war. So it is more a matter of emotions and beliefs.

A natural disaster represents the same kind of phenomenon on a different level than a war.

War is a war waged by humans on the level of emotions and beliefs. Humans can wage war, and war seems to be humanly controllable. He says a natural disaster is like the way war is waged, except it is on a different level, but their nature is the same: both are waged by humans. So our natural phenomena are all waged by ourselves.

Your role in these emotions and beliefs places you within these events, in your own natural position.

Your role in these emotions and beliefs -- for example, in war, in natural disasters, earthquakes, floods, plagues -- your role in these things places you within these events in your own natural position. How does this natural position come about? For example, in the face of a disaster, you might become a rescuer, you might play a victim, you might become a hero who turns the tide, or you might become the instigator who drives the event forward. No matter what role you play, no matter what position you take in this event, that position is determined by your role in your personal emotions and feelings. It is an outward projection of your role in your personal emotions and feelings.

If you are a person who feels you have power, who feels you have a point of power, who feels you are in control of yourself, when disaster comes, you will come forward to save. You will not be crushed or swept away by such a disaster; you will stand up, and with your own strength, with enough confidence, you will feel that I can change it. Although the disaster has occurred, in how to face this disaster, how to handle this disaster, you will be more confident and more resolute than everyone else.

Conversely, if in the whole event you embody the role of powerlessness, if you feel you are passive emotionally -- emotions come and you cannot control them -- and in your beliefs you also feel passive, you have no understanding of the point of power at all, and you don't feel you have any power, then in this situation, when disaster comes, you are entirely a victim. You are swept up and carried along by the disaster, pushed forward by the torrent of history, feeling completely passive, with no control whatsoever.

So here he emphasizes: your role in your personal emotions and beliefs directly determines what your natural position is in these natural phenomena. It is naturally arranged, and it is all very subtle.

This part is the second portion of the Chapter 17 commentary, spanning three subsections. Starting from Chapter 18, it begins to discuss inner and outer storms, creative destruction -- that is, what kind of connection exists between the natural environment and our inner emotions.

注释与核实

1. This claim could not be verified. ↩

2. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Stanford Prison Experiment" (https://www.britannica.com/event/Stanford-Prison-Experiment) ↩

3. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Stanford Prison Experiment | History, Summary, & Facts" (https://www.britannica.com/event/Stanford-Prison-Experiment) ↩

4. Source: Wikipedia, "The Stanford Prison Experiment (film)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stanford_Prison_Experiment_(film)) ↩

5. According to Mike's original words: "A foreign psychologist once conducted a test like this: he put some boys around ten to twelve or thirteen years old separately in a large villa. The villa had cameras for monitoring, and there was no adult supervision. You could do whatever you wanted. There was enough food inside, but it was not ready-made; you had to cook it yourself. He also did a batch of experiments with little girls, likewise to see how they would operate in a completely independent environment." Upon verification, it should be: "This was not an experiment by a psychologist, but a television documentary/reality show filmed by the British Channel 4: a group of boys and a group of girls were placed separately in houses with no adult supervision and required to cook for themselves, filmed by the production crew, and the children could ring a bell to call a nurse or psychologist. The two groups showed markedly different behavior." (Source: Wikipedia, "Boys and Girls Alone," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_and_Girls_Alone) ↩

6. Source: NPR, "Cashier Says He Offered To Pay After Realizing Floyd's $20 Bill Was Fake" (https://www.npr.org/sections/trial-over-killing-of-george-floyd/2021/03/31/983089623/watch-live-cashier-says-he-offered-to-pay-after-realizing-floyds-20-bill-was-fak) ↩

7. Source: Small Arms Survey, "Estimating Global Civilian-held Firearms Numbers," 2018 (https://www.smallarmssurvey.org/resource/estimating-global-civilian-held-firearms-numbers) ↩

8. Source: China Writers Network, "The Full Story Behind Zhang Xianliang's Planting of 'The Green Tree'" (https://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2022/1008/c404063-32540963.html) ↩

9. Source: Xinhua News Agency, "Arsonist nanny executed in east China" (http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-09/21/c_137484178.htm) ↩

10. According to Mike's original words: "In Yuan dynasty society, people were divided into nine ranks, and intellectuals were the lowest rank." Upon verification, it should be: "It is said that in the Yuan dynasty people were divided into ten ranks—first officials, second clerks, third monks, fourth Daoists, fifth physicians, sixth artisans, seventh craftsmen, eighth prostitutes, ninth scholars, tenth beggars. The literati were ranked ninth, not last; the lowest rank was beggars. This account appears only in the writings of Song loyalists Xie Fangde's 'Dieshan Collection' and Zheng Sixiao's 'Xinshi,' and is not recorded in official Yuan dynasty historical sources." (Source: Wikipedia, "Occupational hierarchy in the Yuan dynasty," https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E5%85%83%E6%9C%9D%E7%9A%84%E8%81%8C%E4%B8%9A%E7%AD%89%E7%BA%A7%E5%88%B6%E5%BA%A6) ↩

11. Source: Wikipedia, "A woman's lack of talent is a virtue" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E5%A5%B3%E5%AD%90%E6%97%A0%E6%89%8D%E4%BE%BF%E6%98%AF%E5%BE%B7) ↩

12. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Abraham Maslow" (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abraham-H-Maslow) ↩

13. This claim could not be verified. ↩

14. Source: Wikipedia, "The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foolish_Old_Man_Removes_the_Mountains) ↩