“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Sexual freedom, then, does not involve an enforced promiscuity in which young people, for example, are made to feel unnatural if their encounters with the other sex do not lead to bed.

Dominance and submission have often been used in religious literature in periods when love and devotion were separated from sexuality. They became unified only through religious visions or experiences, for only God’s love was seen as “good enough” to justify a sexuality otherwise felt to be animalistic. Instead, the words “domination” and “submission” have to do with areas of consciousness and its development. Because of interpretations mentioned earlier in this book, you adopted a prominent line of consciousness that to a certain extent was bent upon dominating nature. You considered this male in essence. The female principle then became connected with the earth and all those elements of its life over which you as a species hoped to gain power.

Some people are naturally solitary. They want to live lone lives, and are content. Most, however, have a need for enduring, close relationships. These provide both a psychic and social framework for personal growth, understanding, and development. It is an easy enough matter to shout to the skies: “I love my fellow men,” when on the other hand you form no strong, enduring relationship with others. It is easy to claim an equal love for all members of the species, but love itself requires an understanding that at your level of activity is based upon intimate experience. You cannot love someone you do not know — not unless you water down the definition of love so much that it becomes meaningless.

The span of a god’s love can perhaps equally hold within its vision the existences of all individuals at one time in an infinite loving glance that beholds each person, seeing each with all his or her peculiar characteristics and tendencies. Such a god’s glance would delight in each person’s difference from each other person. This would not be a blanket love, a soupy porridge of a glance in which individuality melted, but a love based on a full understanding of each individual. The emotion of love brings you closest to an understanding of the nature of All That Is. Love incites dedication, commitment. It specifies. You cannot, therefore, honestly insist that you love humanity and all people equally if you do not love one other person. If you do not love yourself, it is quite difficult to love another.

Ideas of love, then, become highly distorted, and its expression also. You do not fight wars for the sake of the brotherhood of man, for example. People who are acquainted with undistorted versions of love in their relationships would find such a concept impossible. Men brought up to be ashamed of the “feminine” sides of their nature cannot be expected to love women. They will see in women instead the despised, feared, and yet charged aspects of their own reality, and behave accordingly in their relationships.

You like to think in terms of units and definitions, so even when you consider your own consciousness you think of it as “a thing,” or a unit — an invisible something that might be held in invisible hands perhaps. Instead consciousness is a particular quality of being. Each portion of “it” contains the whole, so theoretically as far as you are concerned, you can leave your body and be in it simultaneously. You are rarely aware of such experiences because you do not believe them possible, and it seems that even consciousness, particularly when individualized, must be in one place or another.

(12:19.) A man might merge his own consciousness with a running stream, traveling in such a way for miles to explore the layout of the land. To do this he became part water in a kind of identification you can barely understand — but so did the water then become part of the man.