“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For that matter, there is far greater leeway in the behavior of animals than you understand, for you interpret animal behavior according to your own beliefs. You interpret the past history of your species in the same manner. 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. There was instead a different kind of situation. Children do not come in litters. The family of the caveman was a far more “democratic” group than you suppose — men and women working side by side, children learning to hunt with both parents, women stopping to nurse a child along the way, the species standing apart from others because it was not ritualized in sexual behavior.

Women were also somewhat lighter because they would bear the additional weight of a child. Even then, of course, there were variances, for many women are larger than small men. But the women could hunt as well as the men. If compassion, kindness, and gentleness were feminine characteristics only, then no male could be kind or compassionate because such feelings would not be biologically possible.

If your individuality was programmed by your biological sex, then it would be literally impossible for you to perform any action that was not sexually programmed. A woman cannot father a child, nor can a male bear one. Since you are otherwise free to perform other kinds of activity that you think of as sexually oriented, in those areas the orientation is cultural.

If a mother died, the father took over her responsibilities, the qualities of love and affection being quite as alive in him as in the female. After a woman bore, she nursed the child, taking it with her on food-gathering excursions, or sometimes letting other women in the group nurse the child. Often after childbirth, women immediately joined the hunting expeditions, and the fathers made clothing from animals’ hides at home. This allowed the male to rest after prolonged hunting activity, and meant that no adult member of a family became over-exhausted. The work, then, was interchangeable.

Even the animals, however, understand without words or language the importance of their sexual behavior. Early man was hardly more ignorant. The male knew what he was doing even without textbooks that outlined the entire procedure. The female understood the connections between the child born and the sexual act.

(Intently:) It is the height of idiocy to imagine that because of the time taken in pregnancy, the female could not understand the child’s origin in intercourse. The body’s knowledge did not need a complicated language. For that matter, your literal interpretation of childbirth is by some standards a highly limited one. In your terms, it is technically correct.

But a child born to two parents is also an offspring of the earth, its tissues as surely a part of earth as any tree or flower, or burst of ocean spray. A human child, true; but an offspring in which the entire history of the earth is involved — a new creation arising not just from two parents, but from the entire gestalt of nature, from which the parents themselves once emerged; a private yet public affair in which the physical elements of earth become individualized; in which psyche and earth cooperate in a birth that is human, and in other terms, divine.

(11:16.) This unlimited world constantly replenished itself. Children came from women’s wombs. Man was acquainted with death, and many children were stillborn, or were naturally aborted. This also, however, was in the natural order of things, and was done far more easily then than now. All flower seeds do not fall on fertile ground and bring forth other flowers. The seeds that do not grow go [back] into the ground, forming the basis for other life. Biologically speaking, fetuses grow and develop — I am going slowly here because I am being tricky — and when innate consciousness merges with proper form, the conditions are right for the birth of a healthy child. When the conditions are not right, the child does not develop properly. Nature aborts it. The physical elements return to the earth to become the basis for other life.

Only those children perfectly attuned to their environment in time and space survived. This does not mean that the consciousness of a child was annihilated, for example, if it was naturally aborted. It did not develop.