“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause.) Discipline is a form of applied suffering, as discipline is usually used. People are not taught to understand the great dimensions of their own capacity for experience. It is natural for a child to be curious about suffering, to want to know what it is, to see it—and by doing so he (or she) learns to avoid the suffering he does not want, to help others avoid suffering that they do not want, and to understand, more importantly, the gradations of emotion and sensation that are his heritage. [As an adult] he will not inflict pain upon others if he understands this, for he will allow himself to feel the validity of his own emotions.

If you deny yourself the direct experience of your own emotions, but muffle them, say, through too-strict discipline, then you can hurt others much more easily, for you project your deadened emotional state upon them—as in the Nazi war camps [men] followed orders, torturing other people—and you do that first of all by deadening your own sensitivity to pain, and by repressing your emotions.

(10:25.) Man’s vulnerability to pain helps him sympathize with others, and therefore helps him to more actively alleviate whatever unnecessary causes of pain exist in society.

Give us a moment…. That will be it for the evening. My heartiest regards to each of you. I have but one more point to make: Each person’s experience of a painful nature is also registered on the part of what we will call the world’s mind. Each, say, failure, or disappointment, or unresolved problem that results in suffering, becomes a part of the world’s experience: This way or that way does not work, or this way or that way has been tried, with poor results. So in that way even weaknesses or failures of suffering are resolved, or rather redeemed as adjustments are made in the light of those data.