“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the framework of this discussion only, you have a male’s universe. It is a universe endowed with male characteristics as these appear in the male-female orientations of your history. The universe seems to have no meaning because the male “intellect” alone cannot discern meaning, since it must take nothing for granted. Even though certain characteristics of the universe are most apparent, they must be ignored.

(Pause.) You must understand, I know, that the terms “male” and “female” here are being used as they are generally understood, and have nothing to do with the basic characteristics of either sex. In those terms, the male-oriented intellect wants to order the universe, name its parts, and so forth. It wants to ignore the creative aspects of the universe, however, which are everywhere apparent, and it first of all believes that it must divorce itself from any evidence of feeling. You have in your history then a male god of power and vengeance, who killed your enemies for you. You have a prejudiced god, who will, for example, slay the Egyptians and half of the Jews to retaliate against previous Egyptian cruelty. The male god is a god of power. He is not a god of creativity.

The trance itself had feminine connotations, though he conveniently forgot [several excellent male mediums]. And yet at the same time he was afraid of exerting power, for fear it would be thought that he was usurping male prerogatives.

Now (to me): You are creative, but you are a male — and one part of you considered creativity a feminine-like characteristic. If it were tied to moneymaking, as it once was, then painting became also powermaking, and hence acceptable to your American malehood; and I am quite aware of the fact that by the standards of your times both of you were quite liberal, more the pity. You would not take your art to the marketplace after you left commercial work, because then, in a manner of speaking, now, understand, you considered that the act of a prostitute — for your “feminine feelings” that you felt produced the paintings would then be sold for the sake of “the male’s role as provider and bringer of power.”

The art of the old masters escaped such connotations, largely because it involved so much physical labor — the making of colors, canvases, and so forth. That work, providing the artist’s preparation, now belongs to the male-world manufacturer, you see, so as a male in your society the artist is often left with what he thinks of as art’s feminine basis, where it must be confronted, of course.

Indeed, these are some of the reasons why Ruburt distrusted the spontaneous self: because it was feminine, he believed, and therefore more flawed than the spontaneous self of the male.

You run into many contradictions. God is supposed to be male. The soul is sometimes considered female. The angels are male. Now let us look at the Garden of Eden. The story says that Eve tempted the male, having him eat of the tree of good and evil, or the tree of knowledge. (Pause.) This represented a state of consciousness, the point at which the species began to think and feel for itself, when it approached a certain state of consciousness in which it dared exert its own creativity.