“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In a manner of speaking, humanity deals with different predominant themes at different times. There may be minor interweaving ones, but the nature of personality, religion, politics, the family, and the arts — all of these are considered in the light of the predominating theme.

In usual historic terms, humanity has been experimenting with its own unique kind of consciousness, and as I have mentioned many times, this necessitated an arbitrary division between the subject and the perceiver — nature and man — and brought about a situation in which the species came to consider itself apart from the rest of existence.

What you think of as (underlined) male ego-oriented characteristics are simply those human attributes that the species encouraged, brought into the foreground, and stressed. Using those actually as guidelines, you have so far viewed your world and formed your cultures. There are some exceptions of note, but here I am speaking historically of the Western world with its Roman and Greek heritage. Your gods became masculine then; competitive. You saw the species pitted against nature, and man pitted against man. You consider the Greek tragedies great because they echo so firmly your own beliefs. Man is seen in opposition in the most immediate fashion with his own father. Family relationships become a mirror of those beliefs, which are then of course taken as statements of fact concerning the human condition. You thus have a very polarized male-female concept.

Those characteristics that you consider female are, then, those that did not predominate because they represented the source of nature from which the species sought release. To some extent this was a true, creative, sexual drama — again, of high pretense, for in its own way the consciousness of the species was playing for high stakes, and the drama had to be believable.

(Pause at 9:34.) It was seeking for a multiplication of consciousness, forming new offshoots from its own source. It had to pretend to dislike and disown that source in the same way that an adolescent may momentarily turn aside from its parents in order to encourage independence. Before the so-called flowering of Greek and Roman cultures, consciousness had not as yet made that specialization. There were gods and goddesses galore, and deities in whose natures the feminine and masculine characteristics merged. There were deities part human and part animal. The species, then, had not yet taken up the theme that has been predominant in Western culture.

These changes first occurred in man’s stories of the deities. As the species divorced itself from nature, so the animal gods began to vanish. Man first changed his myths, and then altered the reality that reflected them.

As a result, you see in nature only what you want to see, and you provide yourselves with a pattern or model of nature that conforms with your beliefs.

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.