“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When love and sexuality are artificially divided, however, or considered as antagonistic to each other, then all kinds of problems arise. Permanent relationships become most difficult to achieve under such conditions, and often love finds little expression, while one of its most natural channels is closed off. Many children give their greatest expression of love to toys, dolls, or imaginary playmates, because so many stereotyped patterns have already limited other expressions. Their feelings toward parents become ambiguous as a result of the identification procedures thrust upon them. Love, sexuality, and play, curiosity and explorative characteristics, merge in the child in a natural manner. Yet it soon learns that areas of exploration are limited even as far as its own body is concerned. The child is not free to contemplate its own parts. The body is early forbidden territory, so that the child feels it is wrong to love itself in any fashion.

(11:39.) Generally you experience the self as isolated from nature, and primarily enclosed within your skin. Early man did not feel like an empty shell, and yet selfhood existed for him as much outside of the body as within it. There was a constant interaction. It is easy to say to you that such people could identify, say, with the trees, but an entirely different thing to try to explain what it would be like for a mother to become so a part of the tree underneath which her children played that she could keep track of them from the tree’s viewpoint, though she was herself far away.

Consciousness is far more mobile than you realize. Operationally, you have focused yours primarily with the body. You cannot experience subjective behavior “from outside,” so this natural mobility of consciousness, which for example the animals have retained, is psychologically invisible to you.

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.

I am certainly putting this in the most simple of terms, but a bird may have a nest, though it leaves it frequently and never confuses itself with its nesting place. In a manner of speaking that is what you have done, though the body is more animate than the nest.