“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now, you fear that I am about to leap down your throat and I can assure you I will not do so. Now your feelings toward me before this session have very much to do with other attitudes that are very important to you and very ingrained. Some of these are obvious and have to do with this life only; others have to do with past lives. Now you have been terrified of your father from the time you were an infant. And before the session began, You thought of me as an old, but wise and extremely powerful male adult, as you thought of your father when you were a child.

Now this also overshadows your relationship with the males to whom you have come in contact. For you have been, on the one hand, terrified of them, and on the other hand wanted a normal relationship. Give me a moment here —on the one hand you desire more from a relationship with a man than you have any right to expect. No human being could ever deliver what you expect a man to deliver in a relationship. This is because you see the male in terms inspired in you when you were a child. You were terrified of the male, your father. On the other hand, you felt that he did contain wisdom, truth, almost godlike qualities. These qualities you attempt to project into the male that you meet. At the same time you are also terrified because of this background. No man can possibly be as godlike as your inner conception. Therefore, each man is bound to disappoint you. At the same time, you hope and pray subconsciously that the man will disappoint you because this male in your mind has godlike qualities that attract you; on the other, you see him as all powerful and as one who gives out punishment and one who is unreasoning and cruel because you felt that your father was cruel. You are afraid, so to speak, to come under a man’s thumb for this reason, to come under his domination. For to do so is to place yourself in a humble position and a frightening position underneath the male figure. Your terror as a child gave you an inner idea of reality and family group whereby you saw yourself completely powerless and helpless under the domination of this father figure. He was the source of all and yet he could at the same time take all away. And you felt, at the same time, that he would indeed do so. Because you were a male in past lives, you resented this all the more strongly. Give us a moment.

Now, you have, if you will forgive me, consistently chosen those males within whom you sensed feminine qualities. And this was to protect you. You felt that the feminine qualities within the male forespoke of a gentle nature, that would protect you from the overall male violence of which you were afraid and which you exaggerated, because of early impressions. When you understand this material I have given you this evening, it will help you and you should read it often. Bringing this out in the open will automatically help you to rid yourself of these fears. They will not automatically disappear overnight, but they will begin to diminish. It is your idea to use this toy this evening and not mine, so I am not going to worry about my remarks being recorded for posterity. This is your worry.

There was some incident when you were four, I believe, with a boy of your own age or approximately your own age. I am not too clear here, but he hurt you, physically, I believe. Now he hit you with a stick or something of that shape. The symbolism here is obvious. There seems to have been a male teacher in your background also.

You have been afraid that the male would hurt you cruelly—and on purpose, and at the same time, you have endowed him with godlike qualities, and, therefore, demanded more than any man could possibly deliver. I am sure that you realize that when you drive your car, you see yourself in a masculine role, as one of power and strength and one in which you consider yourself invulnerable. Now you are not invulnerable in that car. The reason that you feel invulnerable is that you are subconsciously identifying with this godlike figure and it could lead you into difficulty. Now you have on occasion been cruel to men you have known rather purposely, intending to hurt them before you could be hurt. When you have settled yourself upon a particular man, you see, it becomes a matter of principle with you that you get him. Oh, it does indeed. On the one hand, you want him, on the other hand, as you had to escape from your father, you must also escape from the man and so you are caught in a dilemma. You want him. On the other hand, you must feel that you have independence from him. There was never any communication between you and your father. Therefore, you find it difficult to communicate verbally with a male.

You are not able, at this point, you have never been able to look at a man as an individual human being. You have not seen him as he is, for you have endowed him with all these qualities of which I have told you, and with all the fears that go with them. In the overall then, you deny yourself the experience of really knowing an individual male, for you will not see him as he is. The man realizes, of course, that you do not see him as he is, and each one of the men involved has resented it subconsciously. You do not communicate with an individual man; you communicate with your idea of what this man is, this man with the godlike qualities that can bring both joy and punishment.

Now, you see, you have been robbing yourself of an experience of truly knowing these individual men, for you have not permitted yourself to see them as they are and as they have been. After three lives as a male, you have indeed acclimated yourself very well. You have been somewhat envious. I sense you yelling to yourself when you see a male in strong action or performance, I sense you yelling to yourself—I can do that better than you can for I have done it before—again this is reflected in the way you drive your car.

Again this is reflected in the way you drive your car. Now, the difficulties arising from your relationship with your father also gave you other beneficial effects. This feeling is somewhat responsible for your success as a teacher, for example. For you are then in authority, and you would, if you could, drive your students as you drive your car and force them to go 85 miles a minute. You are easier on them than you are on yourself, however, and you make an excellent teacher. In the back of your mind, however, you are always saying—see Daddy, I am doing something well—for this father of yours in your mind is always behind your shoulder watching you and judging you; now this is your attitude that I am describing. You feel that you must be successful or he will punish you, that you must be perfect; therefore you become panic stricken at any sense of failure within you, and you overexaggerate your failings so that you came here tonight to me as if you were two and a half years old. You would not have been at all surprised had Ruburt (Jane) jumped up grabbed a ruler and banged your fingers. Now, a step further, therefore, is that you expect rejection on the part of the male for this reason. Now this only applies to men who are older than you. You are perfectly happy and content with younger males. Give me a moment here.

Now I will tell you the material that I have given you will help you and you should listen to it often. It should make one thing clear. Your Mr. Reed is not Mr. Reed’s Mr. Reed. You are not seeing the man as he is. You are seeing the image that you have projected upon him, and no one can live up to that image. I realize that when you discuss him that you say—I know he has failings. This is to assure yourself that, after all, the male is not so all powerful. But you do not see this man’s good points or failings clearly. Some of the qualities that you imagine in him as virtues are not and some of the qualities that you imagine to be failings are not failings. You will never have any relationship with the Dick Reed that you have projected upon a living human being. You may have a relationship with that human being, but there is a world of difference between that human being and the imagined image of him to which you react. And it is that image that you see when you look at him and when think of him. That imagined image is real in your mind, it is reality. But you cannot project that image upon another human being and deny him his own reality. You have no chance in a thousand lives of having a relationship with the man you think of as being Dick Reed, because you cannot have a two-way relationship with an image that is one-sided and has no flesh. Now give us a moment. While we are beginning a job, we may as well do a good one.

Now, you overreact in a relationship with a male. You are overanxious. You are afraid of making a wrong step. You watch gestures. You constantly explore a face for a sign that you have made an error. You constantly explore an expression for a sign that you are being rejected and this is directly related to your early relationship with your father. For then a slip met with instant retaliation. There is an emotional charge connected, therefore, with any rejection. And as you tried as a child to think ahead of your father to see what he might be angry at, so you do the same thing now in a relationship with a male to whom you are attracted. I will incidentally give you time later to ask questions. I do not promise to answer them, but I promise you the opportunity to ask them. Now, a moment…

This attitude of yours places the other individual under very strong psychic pressure. You inflict them with this strong anxiety of yours. They are afraid of saying anything wrong because subconsciously they know that you will exaggerate the slightest movement of the smallest muscle. They become very cautious. Now the information that I have given you this evening should help you to begin to see through this image that until now you have projected upon the males. The information will give you several peepholes through which you may squint and see the individual on the other side of this false image. You can make further inroads through that image. The fact that you have reacted in this manner thus far does not mean that you must continue to do so. In other words you are not fated, you see, to always chase this false image or project it outward. It is not eternal, you have formed it. It has not formed you…

Now, Ruburt wants me to help him with voice control. You are so used to the image that you have projected outward that you are uncomfortable when you try to face a situation nakedly without the image. You project the image on one specific individual so strongly. You also project it in any of your relationships, as a rule, with men who are older than yourself. You do not want to or had not wanted to face even a transient relationship with a man because you did not then have time, you see, to project this image in any dependable manner. There was also a gap when you would have to face the individual as he was. This made you uncomfortable and defiant because it forced you, however briefly, to meet another individual eye to eye. It goes without saying that you could not see whatever good qualities there were in any man you knew casually. You did not have time to project the image upon him, and you were afraid to see clearly without it. Practice in such relationships would allow you to get used to an environment without this image. If not giant steps, baby steps, each such encounter being a small exercise in seeing another male individual without your image glasses on.