Seth on Creative Aggression

fire phoenixThe following are excerpts from Chapter 10 & 11 of: The Nature of Personal Reality

“A dream may be purposely experienced to provide an outlet of a kind that is missing in your daily life.”

“Dreams of a strongly aggressive nature in this context may be very beneficial to a given individual, allowing the release of usually inhibited feelings and freeing the body from tension.”

“The schools of “positive thinking” try to remedy the situation, but often do more harm than good because they attempt to force beliefs upon you that you would like to hold, but do not in your present state of confusion.”

“Now if you read a book in your situation that instructs you to contemplate goodness, to turn your thoughts immediately to love and light when you feel irritated, you are in for trouble. Such practices will only serve to make you more frightened of your natural emotions. You will not understand why you have them any better than you did before.You may only hide them more cleverly, and perhaps become ill if, given the situation, you are not already.”

“Many people, for example, are convinced that anger is always negative. It can be the most arousing and therapeutic emotion under certain circumstances. You can then realize that you have cowered before contradictory beliefs for years, rise up in anger against them, and quite literally begin a new life of freedom. Normal aggressiveness is basically a natural kind of communication, particularly in social orders; a way of letting another person know that in your terms they have transgressed, and therefore a method of preventing violence — not of causing it. In animals natural aggression is used with the greatest biological integrity.”

Man has highly charged contradictory attitudes about aggression, and his beliefs about it cause many of his mass and private problems.

“In your society and to some extent in others, the natural communication of aggression has broken down. You confuse violence with aggression, and do not understand aggression’s creative activity or its purpose as a method of communication to prevent violence.You deliberately make great effort, in fact, to restrain the communicative elements of aggression while ignoring its many positive values, until its natural power becomes dammed up, finally exploding into violence. Violence is a distortion of aggression.”

“Aggressiveness leads to action, to creativity and to life. It does not lead to destruction, violence or annihilation.”

“You cannot appreciate your spirituality unless you appreciate your creaturehood. It is not a matter of rising above your nature, but of evolving from the full understanding of it. There is a difference.You will not attain spirituality or even a happy life by denying the wisdom and experience of the flesh. You can learn more from watching the animals than you can from a guru or a minister — or from reading my book. But first you must divest yourselves of the idea that your creaturehood is suspect. Your humanness did not emerge by refusing your animal heritage, but upon an extension of what it is.”

“You think of flowers in terms of gentleness, beauty and “goodness,”and yet every time a new bud opens there is a great thrust of joyful aggressionthat is hardly passive, and a daring and courage that reaches actively outward.Without aggression our body would be denied its growth, the cells within itcaught in inertia. Aggressiveness is at the base of the magnificent bursting of creativity.”

Natural aggression provides the charge for all creativity. Now reading this, many readers will be taken back, for they believe that love is the impetus, and that love is opposed to aggression. There is no such artificial division. Natural aggression is the creative loving thrust forward, the way in which love is activated, the fuel through whose agency love propels itself. (With emphasis:) Aggression in the most basic terms has nothing to do with physical violence as you think of it, but with the force through which love is perpetuated and creatively renewed.”