“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation: You are obsessed with sexual behavior when you proclaim it evil or distasteful or debasing, hide it, and pretend that it is primarily “animalistic.” You are also obsessed with sexual behavior when you proclaim its merits in an exaggerated fashion from the marketplace. You are obsessed with sexual behavior when you put tight, unrealistic bans upon its expression, and also when you set up just as unrealistic standards of active performance to which the normal person is expected to comply.

Some people are naturally solitary. They want to live lone lives, and are content. Most, however, have a need for enduring, close relationships. These provide both a psychic and social framework for personal growth, understanding, and development. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To explore that exterior world was to explore the inner one. Such a person, however, walking through the forest, also felt that he or she was also a portion of the inner life of each rock or tree, materialized. Yet there was no contradiction of identities.