“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

(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.

Physically and psychically the species is connected with all of nature. Man did not live in fear, as is now supposed, nor in some idealized natural heaven. He lived at an intense peak of psychic and biological experience, and enjoyed a sense of creative excitement that in those terms only existed when the species was new.

(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.

(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.