“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.