“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Beliefs about the infant’s sexual nature are of course a part of its advance programming. We are not speaking here of forced growth patterns, or of psychic or biological directions, impressed upon it so that any later divergence from them causes inevitable stress or pain. The fact remains that the child receives patterns of behavior, gently nudging it to grow in certain directions. In normal learning, of course, both parents urge the child to behave in certain fashions. Beside this, however, certain general, learned patterns are biologically transmitted to the child through the genes. Certain kinds of knowledge are transmitted through the genes besides that generally known, having to do with cellular formations and so forth.

Many men, labeled homosexual by themselves and others, want to be fathers. Their beliefs and those of your society lead them to imagine that they must always be heterosexual or homosexual. Many feel a desire toward women that is also inhibited. Your male or female orientation limits you in ways that you do not understand. For example, in many cases the gentle “homosexual” father has a better innate idea of manliness than a heterosexual male who believes that men must be cruel, insensitive, and competitive. These are both stereotyped images, however.

When physical conditions are adverse, such social traditions have often emerged. In times of overpopulation, so-called homosexual and lesbian tendencies come to the surface — but also there is the tendency to express love in other than physical ways, and the emergence of large social issues and challenges into which men and women can throw their energies. There are “lost” portions of the Bible having to do with sexuality, and with Christ’s beliefs concerning it, that were considered blasphemous and did not come down to you through history.

Again, it is natural to express love through sexual acts — natural and good. It is not natural to express love only through sexual acts, however. Many of Freud’s sexual ideas did not reflect man’s natural condition. The complexes and neuroses outlined and defined are products of your traditions and beliefs. You will naturally find some evidence for them in observed behavior. Many of the traditions do come from the Greeks, from the great Greek play-writers, who quite beautifully and tragically presented the quality of the psyche as it showed itself in the light of Grecian traditions.

As a child he once thought that his father was immortal, in human terms — that he could do no wrong. The son tries to vindicate the father by doing no wrong himself, and perhaps by succeeding where it seems the father might have failed. It is much more natural for the male to try to vindicate the father than it is to destroy him, or envy him in negative terms.

(10:54.) The child is simply the male child. He is not jealous of the father with the mother, in the way that is often supposed. The male child does not possess an identity so focused upon its maleness. I am not saying that children do not have a sexual nature from birth. They simply do not focus upon their maleness or femaleness in the way that is supposed.

To the male child, the penis is something that belongs to him personally in the same way that an arm or leg does, or that his mouth or anus does. He does not consider it a weapon (humorously). He is not jealous of his father’s love for the mother, for he understands quite well that her love for him is just as strong. He does not wish to possess his mother sexually in the way that adults currently suppose. He does not understand those terms. He may at times be jealous of her attention, but this is not a sexual jealousy in conventionally understood terms. Your beliefs blind you to the sexual nature of children. They do enjoy their bodies. They are sexually aroused. The psychological connotations, however, are not those assigned to them by adults.