“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.

Your beliefs so structure your experience individually and en masse, however, that evidential material contrary to those ideas shows itself but seldom, or in distorted or exaggerated form. It is quite natural, biologically and psychologically, to operate in certain fashions that are not acceptable in your society, and that seem to run counter to your picture of mankind’s history. In terms of your definitions, then, it is quite natural for some people to behave as males sexually and as females psychologically. It is quite “natural” for others to operate in a reverse fashion.

Again, this may seem difficult to understand, because you assign psychological characteristics to sexual affiliation, whichever it is. There will always be people who naturally seek the experience of parenthood. All of them will not necessarily be heterosexual at any given time.

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.

Puberty comes at a certain time, triggered by deep mechanisms that are related to the state of the natural world, the condition of the species, and those cultural beliefs that in a certain sense you transpose upon the natural world. In other respects, your cultural environment is of course natural. The time that puberty comes varies, then, and afterwards it is possible to parent a child. A time then comes when the period is over. 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. They are largely the result of the interpretations of religion as conventionally understood. And the scientists, for all their seeming independence, often simply found new intellectually acceptable reasons for unconsciously held emotional beliefs.

In times of overpopulation, this mechanism is hardly desirable, but it is a part of the species held in abeyance now, representing nature’s capabilities. In some areas of your world, isolated peoples live on past a hundred years, vital and strong, because they are untouched by your beliefs, and because they live in sympathy and accord with the world as they know and understand it. Occasionally such second puberties happen then, with resulting childbirth, as a small group attempts to maintain its own biological stance.

Left alone, some of these people would die with a feeling of satisfaction. Kept alive through medical techniques, the physical mechanism continues its struggles to revitalize the body and bring about this second puberty — that naturally would only come about under different conditions, with the mind far more alert and the will unimpaired. Now, to some extent (underlined) there is a connection between this innate, rarely observed second puberty and the development of cancer, in which growth is specifically apparent in an exaggerated manner.

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.

You simply are not able to understand the nature of such consciousnesses, and so you interpret their behavior according to your beliefs. This would be sad enough if you did not often use such distorted data to further define the nature of male and female behavior.