“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause at 10:18.) In a fashion—and forgive me for using one of my favorite qualifications again—but in a fashion, cultures do not evolve in the kind of straightforward manner that is usually supposed. Of course, cultures change, but man instantly began to fashion culture, as for example beavers instantly began to form dams. They did not learn how to form dams through trial and error (humorously). They did not for untold centuries build faulty dams, for example. They were born, or created, dam makers.

[...] The energy that would have been used in what you may call, for now, astral projection, was dammed up. [...] The trouble was that the energy that would have been used to carry out the suggestions was dammed up by the ego.

[...] A certain network of “small dams” were set up by the symptoms. [...]

The entire miniature system of dams has been dissolving since our last session. [...]

[...] Finally this evening muscular expansion had gone as far as it could without a completely fresh influx, and the final breaking-down of the small dams. [...]

[...] They were like thumbs in your estimation, subconsciously, to hold back the dam of feared eventuality. [...]

It has been dammed up and directed against the self. [...]

It is only when you dam them up that they appear to be opposed to the intellect, or overwhelming. [...]

[...] However when the ego is too restrictive its conception of purposeful action becomes so narrow that many legitimate and necessary impulses are dammed up, forming these rejected action patterns.

[...] The abilities must be used, the creative urges therefore fully utilized in all areas—the psychic, the spiritual (pause), the more earthy writing and painting, for this energy sweeps through the personality and cannot be dammed up. [...]

(Pause at 10:43.) Now often the ego acts as a dam, to hold back other perceptions — not because it was meant to, or because it is in the nature of an ego to behave in such a fashion, or even because it is a main function of an ego, but simply because you have been taught that the purpose of an ego is restrictive rather than expanding. [...]

[...] He is born wanting to form civilizations as, for example, beavers want to form dams.

An ego could be compared to a small dam in this respect. [...]

[...] Scientists like to say that animals operate through simple instinctive behavior, without will or volition: It is no accomplishment for a spider to make its web, a beaver its dam, a bird its nest, because according to such reasoning, such creatures cannot perform otherwise. [...]

[...] You do not have energy dammed up through repressions, for example, and emotions and their expression are not feared.

[...] You have it in your mind that there is some dam or wall that you must encounter before you are free to leave your body, and such is not the case. [...]

[...] You set up dams. [...]

[...] The Speakers are to keep the information alive in physical terms, to see that men do not bury it within and dam it up, to bring it — the information — to the attention of the conscious self.

[...] Dammed up, they are indeed.

Many such creatures merge their arts so perfectly into their lives that it is impossible to separate the two: The bee’s nest, for example, the beaver’s dam—and there are endless other examples. [...]

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. [...]

[...] Many such creatures merge their arts so perfectly into their lives that it is impossible to separate the two: the spider’s web, for example, or the beaver’s dam—and there are endless other examples. [...]