“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In your present framework, because of the male-female specialization — the male orientation, the implication that the ego is male while the psyche is female — you force upon yourselves great divisions in which operationally the intellect seems separate from the intuitions, and you set up a situation in which opposites seem to apply where there are none. When you think of a scientist, the majority of you will think of a male, an intellectual, an “objective” thinker who takes great pains not to be emotional, or to identify with the subject being examined or studied.

To an extent, some people in the sciences manage to blend the so-called female and male characteristics. When they do so, seeming oppositions and contradictions disappear. To whatever degree, more than their contemporaries, they do not allow sexual roles to blind them psychologically. Therefore they are more apt to combine reason and emotion, intuitions and intellect, and in so doing invent theories that reconcile previous contradictions. They unify, expand, and create, rather than diversify.

Love and devotion are largely seen as female characteristics. Societies and organizations of church and state are seen as male. It is not so much that the male and the female be considered equal as it is that the male and female elements in each person should be released and expressed. Immediately, many of you may be annoyed or alarmed, thinking that of course I mean sexual expression. That is a portion of such expression. But I am speaking of releasing within each individual the great human characteristics and abilities that are often denied expression because they are assigned to the opposite sex.

Since you value sexual performance in the most limited of terms, and use that largely as a focus of identity, then both your old and young suffer consequences that are not so much the result of age as of sexual prejudice. It is interesting to note that both the old and the young also find themselves outside of your organizational frameworks. The young are more freewheeling in their thoughts before they accept sexual roles, and the old are more freewheeling in theirs because they have discarded their sexual roles. I did not say that old or young had no sexual expression — but that both groups did not identify their identities with their sexual roles. There are of course exceptions. If the man or the woman is taught that identity is a matter of sexual performance, however, and that that performance must cease at a certain age, then the sense of identity can also begin to disintegrate. If children feel that identity is dependent upon such performance, then they will begin to perform as quickly as possible. They will squeeze their identity into sexual clothes, and the society will suffer because the great creative thrusts of growing intellect and intuitions will be divided at puberty, precisely when they are needed.

When you look at the animal kingdom, you suppose that the male chooses blindly, led by “dumb” instinct, so that in overall terms one female will do as well as any other. When you discover that a certain chemical or scent will attract a certain male insect, for example, you take it for granted that that element is alone responsible for drawing the male to the female. [...]

[...] During what is called the sexually active time; the larger dimensions of personhood become strictly narrowed into sexually stereotyped roles — and all aspects of identity that do not fit are ignored or denied. The fact is that few people fit those roles. [...]

[...] It is believed that males are naturally promiscuous, aroused by sexual stimuli almost completely divorced from any complementary “deeper” response. The male, then, is thought to want sex whether or not he has any love response to the woman in question — or sometimes to desire her precisely because he does not love her. [...]

The expression of sexuality is considered male, while the expression of love is not considered manly. To some extent or another, then, the male feels forced to divide the expression of his love from the expression of his sexuality. [...]

[...] It is the direct result of the fact that the male has been taught to deny the existence within himself of certain basic emotions. [...] The male, however, chose to take upon himself a kind of specialization of consciousness that, carried too far, leads to a hard over-objectivity. Only in dreams in your time, in your society, is the male free to cry unabashedly, to admit any kind of dependency, and only at certain occasions and usually in relative privacy is he allowed to express feelings of love.

[...] If you are a parent, imagine that you are your mate, and in that role imaginatively consider your children.

[...] It is not asexual, and yet it is the combination of those richest ingredients considered to be male and female.

[...] The male’s aggressive tendencies, often taken as basic characteristics of the species itself, are a case in point. [...]

The psyche is not male or female. [...] In the same manner, aggression is usually understood to be violent assertive action, male-oriented, while female elements are identified in terms of the nurturing principle.

Physically speaking, you would have no males or females unless first you had individuals. [...] The particular kind of focus that you have is responsible for the great significance you place upon male and female. [...]

The psyche is male and female, female and male; but when I say this I realize that you put your own definitions upon those terms to begin with.

[...] It seems to you that the female always tended to the offspring, for example, nursing them, that she was forced to remain close to home while the male fought off enemies or hunted for food. The ranging male, therefore, appears to have been much more curious and aggressive. [...]

[...] Your schools further continue the process, however, so that the areas of curiosity and learning become separated for males and females. The “she” within the male does indeed represent portions of his personality that are being unexpressed — not because of any natural predominance of mental or emotional characteristics over others, but because of artificial specializations. The same applies to the “male” within the female. [...]

[...] Again, the male who was intuitive or artistically gifted in certain ways often therefore considered himself homosexual, whether or not he was, because his emotional and mental characteristics seem to fit the female rather than the male sex.

[...] Males ruled both (they still do), and yet those leading religious organizations at least recognized their intuitive base. They constantly tried to manipulate religion’s substructure in the same acceptable male ways that government leaders always use to inhibit and use the emotions.

The sexual schism begins when the male child is taught to identify exclusively with the father image, and the female child with the mother image — for here you have a guilt insidiously incorporated into the growth process.

[...] He explained that these were our entity names, and I was half amused to have a male one, and to find Seth referring to me as “he” or “him.” [...]

Now we discover that such references were tailored to our own rather limited ideas of the qualities assigned to the sexes, for in Psyche Seth makes it clear that the psyche is not male or female, “but a bank from which sexual affiliations are drawn.” [...]

And in all of this, as always, Seth stresses probabilities as playing a vital role in the development of the individual and the species, and as representing the basis for free will. [...]