“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Love is naturally creative and explorative — that is, you want to creatively explore the aspects of the beloved one. Even characteristics that would otherwise appear as faults attain a certain loving significance. They are accepted — seen, and yet they make no difference. Because these are still attributes of the beloved one, even the seeming faults are redeemed. The beloved attains prominence over all others.

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.

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.