“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your sexual characteristics represent a portion of your personhood. They provide vital areas of expression, and focal points about which to group experience. Your sexual qualities are a part of your nature, but they do not define it.

The larger pattern of human personhood demands a bisexual affiliation that allows leeway in sexual encounters, a leeway that provides a framework in which individuals can express feelings, abilities, and characteristics that follow the natural inclines of the personal psyche rather than sexual stereotypes. I am not speaking here of anything so simple as merely allowing women more freedom, or relieving men from the conventional breadwinner’s role. I am certainly not talking about “open marriage” as it is currently understood, but of far greater issues. Before we can consider these, however, there are several points I would like to make.

Now, old people who are considered senile or unmanageable are sometimes experiencing new bursts of sexual activity for which no outlet is given. Beside this, they have lost their conventional sexual roles, in which they earlier expressed their energy.

There are often hormonal changes occurring that go unnoticed. Many express a nervous, erratic type of behavior as they are aroused — some not only sexually but intellectually. The new adolescence never comes. The new puberty dies a slow death, for your society has no framework in which to understand it. And indeed it shows itself in a distorted fashion that can appear most grotesque.

Love exists whether or not it is sexually expressed, though it is natural for love to seek expression. Love implies loyalty. It implies commitment. This applies to lesbian and homosexual relationships as well as to heterosexual ones. In your society, however, identity is so related to sexual stereotypes that few people know themselves well enough to understand the nature of love, and to make any such commitments.

A transitory period is currently taking place, in which women seem to seek the promiscuous sexual freedom more generally granted to men. 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. In such cases, sex becomes not an expression of love, but an expression of derision or scorn.

So women, accepting these ideas often, seek for a situation in which they too can feel free to express their sexual desires openly, whether or not any love is involved. Yet loyalty is love’s partner, and the primates display such evidence in varying degrees. The male in particular has been taught to separate love and sex, so that a schizophrenic condition results that tears apart his psyche — in operational terms — as he lives his life.

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 would be disastrous for women to follow the same course.

In so distorting your ideas of sex, you further limit the great capacities of human loyalty, which is always connected with love and love’s expression. Lesbian and homosexual relationships then are at best tenuous, overwrought with confused emotions, very seldom able to maintain a stability that allows for individual growth. Heterosexual relationships also break down, for the identity of each partner becomes based upon sexual roles that may or may not apply to the individuals involved.

Since you feel that sex is the only proper method of love’s expression, and yet also believe that sex and love are divided, you are in a quandary. These sexual beliefs are also far more important in national relationships than you realize, for you attempt to take what you think of as a masculine stance as a nation. So, for example, does Russia. India takes a feminine stance — in terms of your beliefs, now.

One small note: A male with growths of any kind — kidney stones or ulcers, for example — has tendencies he considers feminine, and therefore “dependent,” of which he is ashamed. In a mock biological ceremony, he gives birth to the extent that he produces within his body material that was not there before. In ulcers the stomach becomes the womb — bloodied, giving birth to sores — his interpretation of a male’s “grotesque” attempt to express feminine characteristics.