“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your ideas about sexuality and your beliefs about the nature of the psyche often paint a picture of very contradictory elements. The psyche and its relationship to sexuality affects your ideas of health and illness, creativity, and all of the ordinary areas of individual life. In this chapter, therefore, we will consider some of the implications that result.

Your psychological tests show you only the current picture of males and females, brought up from infancy with particular sexual beliefs. These beliefs program the child from infancy, of course, so that it behaves in certain fashions in adulthood. The male seems to perform better at mathematical tasks, and so-called logical mental activity, while the female performs better in a social context, in value development and personal relationships. The male shows up better in the sciences, while the female is considered intuitional.

The child is not born a sponge, however, empty but ready to soak up knowledge. It is already soaked in knowledge. Some will come to the surface, so to speak, and be used consciously. Some will not. I am saying here that to some extent the child in the womb is aware of the mother’s beliefs and information, and that to some extent (underlined) it is “programmed” to behave in a certain fashion, or to grow in a certain fashion as a result.

Basically the species is relatively so freewheeling, with so many potentials, that it is necessary that the mother’s beliefs provide a kind of framework in the beginning, allowing the child to focus its abilities in desired directions. It knows ahead of time then the biological, spiritual, and social environment into which it is born. It is somewhat prepared to grow in a certain direction — a direction that is applicable and suited to its conditions.

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.

(Pause at 9:35.) Give us a moment… Survival of the human species, as it has developed, is a matter of belief far more than is understood — for certain beliefs are now built in. They become biologically pertinent and transmitted. I mean something else here besides, for example, a telepathic transmission: the translation of beliefs into physical codes that then become biological cues. [As a result], it then becomes easier for a boy to act in a given manner biologically than in another.

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.

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.

The beliefs involving the son’s inherent rivalry with the father, and his need to overthrow him, follow instead patterns of culture and tradition, economic and social, rather than biological or psychological. Those ideas serve as handy explanations for behavior that is not inherent or biologically pertinent.