“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.

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.

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:] “Yes, I know. And around school he plays the ‘cool guy’ role, the ‘love them and leave them’ image. Not in what he says but in his appearance. This is the image that others project on him and he allows the image to stay. The students accept this as being Dick. Most of the other women or men like to destroy the image or try to prove it wrong, but they do that out of resentment; they see Dick as a threat. Now showing that image and suddenly having Seth come along and say he doesn’t want physical relations with a female; this could be hard to accept. And yet out of all the people, we would be able to accept this and not see anything wrong.”