“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.