“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Before then there were various kinds of divisions of labor, but great leeway in sexual expression. Children were a necessary part of the family, for a family was a band of people who belonged together, cooperating in the search for food and shelter.

Homosexual or lesbian relationships, as you term them, existed quite freely, and simultaneously. These were considered pertinent with or without sexual expression, and served as strong bonds of sisterhood and brotherhood.

When you view the animal kingdom, you also do so through your specialized sexual beliefs, studying the behavior of the male and female, looking for patterns of aggressiveness, territorial jealousy, passivity, mothering instincts, or whatever. These specialties of interest make you blind to many larger dimensions of animal behavior. To some degree, the so-called mothering instinct belongs to male and female alike in any species that can be so designated. Animals have close friendships, with or without sexual expression, with members of the same sex. Love and devotion are not the prerogatives of one sex or one species.

Love and devotion are largely seen as female characteristics. Societies and organizations of church and state are seen as male. It is not so much that the male and the female be considered equal as it is that the male and female elements in each person should be released and expressed. Immediately, many of you may be annoyed or alarmed, thinking that of course I mean sexual expression. That is a portion of such expression. But I am speaking of releasing within each individual the great human characteristics and abilities that are often denied expression because they are assigned to the opposite sex.

There seems to be a division between science and religion, for even organized religion has an intuitive basis. The male scientist is often ashamed of using his intuitions, for not only do they appear to be unscientific, but female as well. It is what others will think about his masculinity that such a man is concerned with. To be “illogical” is a scientific “crime” — not so much because it is an unscientific attribute, but because it is considered a feminine one. Science has followed the male orientation and become its epitome. Up until the present, science has consistently tried to do without the so-called feminine qualities. It has divorced knowledge from emotion, understanding from identification, and stressed sexuality over personhood.

To an extent, some people in the sciences manage to blend the so-called female and male characteristics. When they do so, seeming oppositions and contradictions disappear. To whatever degree, more than their contemporaries, they do not allow sexual roles to blind them psychologically. Therefore they are more apt to combine reason and emotion, intuitions and intellect, and in so doing invent theories that reconcile previous contradictions. They unify, expand, and create, rather than diversify.

Einstein was such a person in the sciences. While he was tainted to some extent by conventional sexual beliefs, he still felt his own personhood in such a way that he gladly took advantage of characteristics considered feminine. As a youngster particularly, he rebelled against male-oriented learning and orientation. This rebellion was psychological — that is, he maintained an acceptable male orientation in terms of sexual activity, but he would not restrain his mind and soul with such nonsense. The world felt the result of his great intuitive abilities, and of his devotion.

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.

Any deep exploration of the self will lead you into areas that will confound conventional beliefs about sexuality. You will discover an identity, a psychological and psychic identity, that is in your terms male and female, one in which those abilities of each sex are magnified, released, and expressed. They may not be so released in normal life, but you will meet the greater dimensions of your own reality, and at least in the dream state catch a glimpse of the self that transcends a one-sex orientation.

The overly specific sexual orientation, then, reflects a basic division in consciousness. It not only separates a man from his own intuitions and emotions to some extent, or a woman from her own intellect, but it effectively provides a civilization in which mind and heart, fact and revelation, appear completely divorced. To some degree each person is at war with the psyche, for all of an individual’s human characteristics must be denied unless they fit in with those considered normal to the sexual identity.

To one degree or another in ordinary life, you end up with sexual caricatures in practical existence.

You do not understand what true womanhood or true manhood is. You are forced instead to concentrate upon a shallow kind of diversity. As a result, the reflection of sexual schism taints all of your activities, but most of all it limits your psychological reality.

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.

Ideally, the adult male or female would rejoice in sexual expression and find an overall orientation, but would also bask in a greater psychological and psychic identity that experienced and expressed all of the great human capabilities of mind and heart, which splash over any artificial divisions.