“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(9:47.) God, therefore, became male. The love and devotion that might otherwise be connected with the facets of nature and the female principle had to be “snatched away from” any natural attraction to sexuality. In such a way, religion, echoing your state of consciousness, was able to harness the powers of love and use them for purposes of domination. They became state-oriented. A man’s love and devotion was a political gain. Fervor was as important as a government’s treasury, for a state could count upon the devotion of its lieutenants in the same way that many fanatics will work without money for a cause.

In your world you identify as yourself only, and yet love can expand that identification to such an extent that the intimate awareness of another individual is often a significant portion of your own consciousness. You look outward at the world not only through your eyes, but also, to some extent at least, through the eyes of another. It is true to say, then, that a portion of you figuratively walks with this other person as he or she goes about separate from you in space.

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.

In those early times, then, consciousness was more mobile. Identity was more democratic. In a strange fashion this does not mean that individuality was weaker. Instead it was strong enough to accept within its confines many divergent kinds of experience. A person, then, looking out into the world of trees, waters and rock, wildlife and vegetation, literally felt that he or she was looking at the larger, materialized, subjective areas of personal selfhood.

(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.

You can imagine atoms and molecules forming objects with little difficulty. In the same way, however, portions of identified consciousness can also mix and merge, forming alliances.