“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(10:03.) The Catholic Church taught that revelation was dangerous. Intellectual and psychic obedience was much the safer road, and even the saints were slightly suspect. Women were inferiors, and in matters of religion and philosophy most of all, for there their creativity could be most disruptive. Women were considered hysterics, aliens to the world of intellectual thought, swayed instead by incomprehensible womanish emotions. Women were to be handled by wearing down their energies through childbirth.

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.

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.

(10:20.) I want to make it plain that such ideas are rampant in society, and are at the basis of many personal and national problems. They are behind large issues, involved in the [Three Mile Island] nuclear fiasco, for example, and in the scientist’s idea of power and creation. Both of you, highly creative, find your creativity in conflict with your ideas of sexuality, privately and in your stances with the world. Much of this is involved with the unfortunate myths about the creative person, who is not supposed to be able to deal with the world as well as others, whose idiosyncrasies are exaggerated, and whose very creativity, it is sometimes said, leads to suicide or depression. No wonder few numbers of creative people persist in the face of such unfortunate beliefs!

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.

(She laughed. “You’re so strange. Here you won’t go to the marketplace, but you think of saving all of these private sessions for posterity, to give them to the world some day. You’re very close-mouthed: You don’t blab our personal business, but you’d do that…. Instead, I see us when I’m 80 and you’re 90, out in the back yard, burning it all.”