“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I will clear up my meaning of the word “natural” later. However, when you examine animal behavior even in its most natural-seeming environment, for instance, you are not observing the basic behavior patterns of such creatures, because those relatively isolated areas exist in your world. Quite simply, you cannot have one or two or twenty officially-designated natural regions in which you observe animal activity, and expect to find anything more than the current adaptation of those creatures — an adaptation that is superimposed upon their “natural” reactions.

The balance of resources, animal travel patterns, migrations, weather conditions — all of these must be taken into consideration. Such isolated observation areas merely present you with a distorted picture of natural behavior, because the animals are also imprisoned within them. Civilization binds them round.

Other animals are kept out. The hunted and the prey are highly regulated. All areas of animal behavior alter to fit the circumstances as much as possible, and this includes sexual activity. To some extent the animals have been conditioned to the changing world. Now man is obviously part of nature, so you may say: “But those changes wrought by him are natural.” When he studies such animal behavior, however, and sometimes uses the sexual patterns of the animals to make certain points about human sexuality, then man does not take this into consideration, but speaks as if the present observed animal behavior is the indication of a prime or basic nature inherent in their biology.

Each species is involved in a cooperative venture, upon which ultimately all earthly existence rests. You project your present beliefs backward into history, and you misinterpret many of the conditions that you observe in the natural world. This cooperation that I speak of is based on love, and that love has a biological as well as a spiritual basis. Your beliefs, for example, cause you to deny the existence of emotions in animals, and any instances of love among them are assigned to “blind” instinct.

In the natural biological flow of a person’s life, there are periods of varying intensities, in which love and its expression fluctuates, and tends toward different courses. There are also individual variations that are of great importance. These natural rhythms are seldom observed, however. Tendencies toward lesbianism or homosexuality in children are quite natural. They are so feared, however, that often just-as-natural leanings toward heterosexuality are blocked. Instead, the young person is stereotyped.