“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

We have only dealt with one side of this relationship. Now this Mr. Reed has his own part to play. And his purposes and your purposes to this point have fit together beautifully, for neither of you have seen the other. He has seen his image of you. For his own reasons, he has not allowed himself to know an individual woman. And he does not want to know an individual woman physically—he does not want to. Give us a moment.

One point, you see, this artificial image that you have projected upon others has prevented you from knowing them, and in itself has prevented any legitimate relationship which might otherwise have occurred. As long as you allow this image to cover your eyes, you do not see the individual man and do not react to him for the image is between the two of you. Now you have frightened our young man. On the one hand he resents the image that you have placed upon him, and on the other hand it serves his vanity to accept it. He would much rather have you think of him as this image. He is hiding himself and you have very nicely given him an image to hide behind. You speak to each other in symbols and writing and poetry. You are using the symbols to escape normal human give and take. They are not symbols to aid in communication; they are symbols behind which you hide from communicating.

([Pat:]“He said he didn’t want physical relationships with a female.”

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…

… He is afraid of any contacts that would … It seems here that there is a certain thing that he fears will happen to him if he involves himself in any relationship that would result in a family group. There is something here particularly with him… an intense loyalty from a past life having to do with his parents. There was a situation involving the three of them and he abandoned them in a way that he interpreted as a betrayal. The relationship between them then was different than it is now. He will not leave them now for he feels that he abandoned them in the past. In this past of which I speak there was a physical difficulty suffered after he abandoned them; and if he leaves them now, he is afraid that this physical difficulty will return. The main problem in his case stems from this particular immediate past life. We are trying to focus in on this.

([Pat:] “Can a worthwhile relationship develop between Dick and me?”)

I will not say to you yes or no. No worthwhile relationship can develop while you project this image on him. Nor have you given me your definition of a worthwhile relationship.

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.