“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In your present framework, because of the male-female specialization — the male orientation, the implication that the ego is male while the psyche is female — you force upon yourselves great divisions in which operationally the intellect seems separate from the intuitions, and you set up a situation in which opposites seem to apply where there are none. When you think of a scientist, the majority of you will think of a male, an intellectual, an “objective” thinker who takes great pains not to be emotional, or to identify with the subject being examined or studied.

Generally, reason and intellect are then considered male qualities, and the frameworks for civilization, science, and an organized world. The intuitions and the impulses are considered erratic, untrustworthy, feminine, and to be controlled. The world exists because of spontaneous order. Civilization began because of the impulse of people to be together. It grew spontaneously and came into order. You only see the outside of many processes because your objectified viewpoint does not allow you the identification that would show you more. It seems to you then that all systems sometime break down — become less orderly or fall into chaos.

You apply this belief to physical systems and psychological ones. In terms of sex, you insist upon a picture that shows you a growth into a sexual identity, a clear focus, and then in old age a falling away of clear sexual identification into “sexual disorder.” It does not occur to you that the original premise or focus, the identification of identity with sexual nature, is “unnatural.” It is you, then, who form the entire framework from which your judgment is made. In many cases the person is truer to his or her own identity in childhood or old age, when greater individual freedom is allowed, and sexual roles are more flexible.

Such an encounter with the psyche is often met by great artists or writers, or by mystics. This kind of realization is necessary if you are to ever transcend the framework of seeming opposites in which your world is involved.

Since you value sexual performance in the most limited of terms, and use that largely as a focus of identity, then both your old and young suffer consequences that are not so much the result of age as of sexual prejudice. It is interesting to note that both the old and the young also find themselves outside of your organizational frameworks. The young are more freewheeling in their thoughts before they accept sexual roles, and the old are more freewheeling in theirs because they have discarded their sexual roles. I did not say that old or young had no sexual expression — but that both groups did not identify their identities with their sexual roles. There are of course exceptions. If the man or the woman is taught that identity is a matter of sexual performance, however, and that that performance must cease at a certain age, then the sense of identity can also begin to disintegrate. If children feel that identity is dependent upon such performance, then they will begin to perform as quickly as possible. They will squeeze their identity into sexual clothes, and the society will suffer because the great creative thrusts of growing intellect and intuitions will be divided at puberty, precisely when they are needed.