“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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. [...] 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. [...] 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.

To love someone, you must appreciate how that person differs from yourself and from others. You must hold that person in mind so that to some extent love is a kind of meditation — a loving focus upon another individual. Once you experience that kind of love you can translate it into other terms. The love itself spreads out, expands, so that you can then see others in love’s light.

[...] 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.

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. [...] Love, sexuality, and play, curiosity and explorative characteristics, merge in the child in a natural manner. [...] The body is early forbidden territory, so that the child feels it is wrong to love itself in any fashion.

[...] 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. [...] A man’s love and devotion was a political gain. [...]

Ideas of love, then, become highly distorted, and its expression also. [...] 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. [...]

You begin to program sexual activity when you divorce it from love and devotion. It is very easy then for church or state to claim and attract your uncentered loyalty and love, leaving you with the expression of a sexuality stripped of its deepest meanings.

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. [...]

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. [...]

Again, all love is not sexually oriented. Yet love naturally seeks expression, and one such expression is through sexual activities.

Love itself seems to quicken the physical senses, so that even the most minute gestures attain additional significance and meaning. Myths and tales are formed in which those who love communicate, though one is dead while the other lives. The experience of love also deepens the joy of the moment, even while it seems to emphasize the briefness of mortality. Though love’s expression brilliantly illuminates its instant, at the same time that momentary brilliance contains within it an intensity that defies time, and is somehow eternal.

All of this also applies to the animals to varying degrees. Even in animal groups, individuals are not only concerned with personal survival, but with the survival of “family” members. Each individual in an animal group is aware of the others’ situations. The expression of love is not confined to your own species, therefore, nor is tenderness, loyalty, or concern. Love indeed does have its own language — a basic nonverbal one with deep biological connotations. It is the initial basic language from which all others spring, for all languages’ purposes rise from those qualities natural to love’s expression — the desire to communicate, create, explore, and to join with the beloved.

(Long pause at 11:22.) Give us a moment… Speaking historically in your terms, man first identified with nature, and loved it, for he saw it as an extension of himself even while he felt himself a part of its expression. In exploring it he explored himself also. He did not identify as himself alone, but because of his love, he identified also with all those portions of nature with which he came into contact. This love was biologically ingrained in him, and is even now biologically pertinent.

“THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE.” IMAGES AND THE BIRTH OF WORDS

(10:59.) Next chapter heading: “ ‘The Language of Love.’ Images and the Birth of Words.”

It is almost commonplace to say that those who are in love can converse without words. Dramas and stories of all kinds have been written about the inner kind of communication that seems to take place between mother and children, sister and brother, or lover and beloved.

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.