“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

What you think of as (underlined) male ego-oriented characteristics are simply those human attributes that the species encouraged, brought into the foreground, and stressed. Using those actually as guidelines, you have so far viewed your world and formed your cultures. There are some exceptions of note, but here I am speaking historically of the Western world with its Roman and Greek heritage. Your gods became masculine then; competitive. You saw the species pitted against nature, and man pitted against man. You consider the Greek tragedies great because they echo so firmly your own beliefs. Man is seen in opposition in the most immediate fashion with his own father. Family relationships become a mirror of those beliefs, which are then of course taken as statements of fact concerning the human condition. You thus have a very polarized male-female concept.

Love and devotion are largely seen as female characteristics. Societies and organizations of church and state are seen as male. It is not so much that the male and the female be considered equal as it is that the male and female elements in each person should be released and expressed. Immediately, many of you may be annoyed or alarmed, thinking that of course I mean sexual expression. That is a portion of such expression. But I am speaking of releasing within each individual the great human characteristics and abilities that are often denied expression because they are assigned to the opposite sex.

In your present framework, because of the male-female specialization — the male orientation, the implication that the ego is male while the psyche is female — you force upon yourselves great divisions in which operationally the intellect seems separate from the intuitions, and you set up a situation in which opposites seem to apply where there are none. When you think of a scientist, the majority of you will think of a male, an intellectual, an “objective” thinker who takes great pains not to be emotional, or to identify with the subject being examined or studied.

When you view the animal kingdom, you also do so through your specialized sexual beliefs, studying the behavior of the male and female, looking for patterns of aggressiveness, territorial jealousy, passivity, mothering instincts, or whatever. These specialties of interest make you blind to many larger dimensions of animal behavior. To some degree, the so-called mothering instinct belongs to male and female alike in any species that can be so designated. Animals have close friendships, with or without sexual expression, with members of the same sex. Love and devotion are not the prerogatives of one sex or one species.

Your psychological tests show you only the current picture of males and females, brought up from infancy with particular sexual beliefs. [...] The male seems to perform better at mathematical tasks, and so-called logical mental activity, while the female performs better in a social context, in value development and personal relationships. The male shows up better in the sciences, while the female is considered intuitional.

(10:54.) The child is simply the male child. [...] The male child does not possess an identity so focused upon its maleness. [...] They simply do not focus upon their maleness or femaleness in the way that is supposed.

Give us a moment… In your terms, again, the psyche contains what you would consider male and female characteristics, while not being male or female itself.

[...] They feel forced to imitate what they think the natural male or female is like, and on occasion end up with ludicrous caricatures. These caricatures infuriate those so imitated — because they carry such hints of truth, and point out so cleverly the exaggerations of maleness or femaleness that many heterosexuals have clamped upon in their own natures.

The psyche is not male or female. [...] In the same manner, aggression is usually understood to be violent assertive action, male-oriented, while female elements are identified in terms of the nurturing principle.

Physically speaking, you would have no males or females unless first you had individuals. [...] The particular kind of focus that you have is responsible for the great significance you place upon male and female. [...]

The psyche is male and female, female and male; but when I say this I realize that you put your own definitions upon those terms to begin with.

[...] It seems to you that the female always tended to the offspring, for example, nursing them, that she was forced to remain close to home while the male fought off enemies or hunted for food. The ranging male, therefore, appears to have been much more curious and aggressive. [...]

The projection of the man’s anima, or hidden female self, upon [his] relations is quite natural, and allows him not only to understand them better but to relate with the other female existences of his own. The same is true of the woman’s projection of the animus upon male relatives and friends. [...]

[...] In simple terms the whole self contains male and female characteristics, finely tuned together, blended so that true identity can then arise — for it cannot, when one group of characteristics must be emphasized over the other group, as it must be during your present physical existence.

[...] There may be a series of male or female existences, unbroken. [...]

[...] This does not mean that an equal number of male and female lives must be lived. [...]

The male-female tendencies at that time became psychically alienated from each other.* The differences were exaggerated. The ancient mother-goddess concept became “unconscious”; the male, purposely forgetting the great natural aggressive thrust of birth, took physical aggression and force as his prerogative — for this came to represent the quality of ego consciousness in its need to physically manipulate its environment.

Christ, as he is known historically, psychically represented man’s probabilities. [...] The male aspects of Christ were the ones that Western civilization emphasized. [...]

[...] When, in historic terms, the race was in the process of adopting a necessary artificial separation of itself from the rest of nature; when it needed to be assured of its abilities to do so; when it took upon itself the task of a particular kind of specialization and individual focus, it needed a religion that would assure it of its abilities.

[...] Christ, historically speaking, had altered that concept enough so that at least God the Father was not quite as capricious as Jehovah. [...]

[...] I’m thinking about androgyny, of course, which is the concept of both male and female in one, and/or of hermaphroditism, wherein a person or animal possesses the sexual organs of both the male and the female. [...]

All of which reminds me that to many viewers the “portraits” I paint are balanced equally between the masculine and feminine, regardless of whether the subject in any one of them is male or female. The paintings are of personalities I see mentally rather than physically; they do represent, I believe, my efforts to unify in any particular image my intuitive appreciation of the male/female qualities embodied within each of us.

[...] The individual would say, for example, “I am Joe, and Jane, and Jim, and Bob.”⁶ There are physical variations of a sexual nature, so that on all levels identity includes the male and female. [...]

[...] And a number of old disciplines thought that before the creation of Eve from his body, Adam, the first, original man, was really male and female.

([Mark:] “Was that a male or a female?”)

It was a male. A dandy was always a male. [...]

[...] You were only hiding in the thoughts of such a relationship from a relationship with a male that you were afraid to take on. Male in general. [...]

[...] It wants to see inner knowledge projected outward onto the physical reality then, to some extent, it will accept it and so through the eons that you know this inner knowledge, this inner vitality is projected outward onto history and onto historical events as you understand them. [...]

Now we discover that such references were tailored to our own rather limited ideas of the qualities assigned to the sexes, for in Psyche Seth makes it clear that the psyche is not male or female, “but a bank from which sexual affiliations are drawn.” [...]

[...] He explained that these were our entity names, and I was half amused to have a male one, and to find Seth referring to me as “he” or “him.” [...]

[...] The minds of the past and future are open to us, or at least their contents are, not in a parasitic relationship but in a lively give-and-take, in which knowledge from each time period enriches every other historical era. [...]

[...] Before, man had been neither male nor female, combining the characteristics of each, but now the physical bodies also specialized in terms of sexuality. [...] By the time the Biblical legend came into being, however, historical events and social beliefs were transformed into the Adam and Eve version of events.

To sum up Seth’s somewhat amused comments in the 12th session for January 2, 1964: “Sex, regardless of all your fleshy tales, is a psychic phenomenon, merely certain qualities which you call male and female. [...] When I say as I have that the overall entity, or whole self, is neither male or female, and yet refer [to some] entities by definitely male names such as ‘Ruburt’ and ‘Joseph’ [as Seth calls me] I merely mean that in the overall essence, the [given] entity identifies itself more with the so-called male characteristics than with the female.”

[...] And both were given the opportunity and the challenge of shattering old, historic frameworks, and of rising beyond them.

[...] The mother was expected to bear perfect children and to be subservient to the male, at least in outward fashion.

3. Almost always Seth refers to Jane by her male entity name, “Ruburt” — and so “he,” “his,” and “him.”

In the historical time of Christ, I was a man called Millenius, in Rome. [...]

[...] Perhaps I should say two males, one in the higher capacity and the other his chancellor, with whom I was involved as Pope; and I sent armies to the north also.

I did not play the part of any towering personality of historical note, but became experienced in the homey and intimate details of daily life, the normal struggle for achievement, the need for love. [...]

Using your historical reference, I returned at the time of the cavemen, operating as a Speaker. [...]

(Speaking of names, this is the time to remind all that Seth calls both Jane and me by male names: Ruburt and Joseph. Why does he speak of Jane as a male — and so as “he” and “him?” In Note 6 for Session 679, in Volume 1, I quoted Seth from the 12th session for January 2, 1964:) Sex, regardless of all your fleshy tales, is a psychic phenomenon, merely certain qualities which you call male and female. [...] When I say as I have that the overall entity [or whole self] is neither male nor female, and yet refer to [some] entities by definite male names such as “Ruburt” and “Joseph,” I merely mean that in the overall essence, the [given] entity identifies itself more with the so-called male characteristics than with the female.

[...] Carl Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, postulated that the unconscious of the male contains a female, archetypal (or typical, instinctive) figure called the “anima”; the correlative male form in the unconscious of the female Jung called the “animus.” In Session 119, then, Seth comments on how Jane herself has an animus — the hidden male within — and on how Ruburt, that larger “male” entity of which she is a “self-conscious part,” contains an anima, or hidden female. [...] From this information I infer that the entity or whole self of each of us, regardless of our current, individual sexual orientation, contains its own counterbalancing male or female quality, whichever the case may be. [...]

[...] Since Seth presumably wouldn’t simply relay such messages, would Jane find herself giving voice for a host of others, male and female, young and old, from many time periods and of the most diverse nationalities? [...]

[...] I am not, as I believe I have mentioned, a secondary or split personality of Ruburt’s. For example, I am not a conglomeration of male tendencies that have collected themselves into a subsidiary personality that struggles for recognition or release. I say that I am an energy personality essence, since that is what I am … My name for him is Ruburt,¹⁵ which happens to be a male name simply because it is the closest translation, in your terms, for the name of the whole self or entity of which he is now a self-conscious part.

[...] If a personality believes that it is doing a poor job in a male life, it may activate the anima’s qualities, taking on the characteristics of a past female existence in which it handled itself well. [...]

(1. In the 556th session, Seth said that many writers of historical pieces are writing out of direct past-life experience. [...]

[...] There are physical variations of a sexual nature, so that on all levels identity includes the male and female. [...]

[...] In the past as you think of it historically, several groups experimented along those lines. [...]

(With emphasis:) Reincarnation simply represents probabilities in a time context (underlined) — portions of the self that are materialized in historical contexts. [...]

[...] Seth explained that both of us had been parents before, experiencing both the male and female roles. [...]

[...] Whether this is established historically Jane and I do not know. [...]

[...] According to him, these “entity names” mean only that in our present lives we identify more with the male aspects of our entities, or whole selves — which in themselves are neither male or female, but contain within them a number of other selves [of both sexes] to whom we’re related, or a part of, reincarnationally and otherwise.

[...] Only when the private nature of reality was emphasized sufficiently would I be ready to show how the magnification of individual reality combines and enlarges to form vast mass reactions — such as, say, the initiation of an obviously new historical and cultural period; the rise or overthrow of governments; the birth of a new religion that sweeps all others before it; mass conversions; mass murders in the form of wars; the sudden sweep of deadly epidemics; the scourge of earthquakes, floods, or other disasters; the inexplicable appearance of periods of great art or architecture or technology.

[...] Within the context of my discussion, reincarnation is Seth’s historical version of his counterpart concept, which is that each of us is physically connected with certain other males and females who are living at the same time we are, and who are exploring physical life from a variety of viewpoints in ways that no one physical self could possibly match. [...]

[...] As Seth and I both noted in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, each of us has our focus of identity now—not in some other portion of the spacious present, just as each reincarnational self has his or her own historical focus of identity. [...]

[...] I also showed our visitors several of my portraits from my own past lives, both male and female, that Seth had mentioned long ago, or that I’d tuned into through dreams. [...] But then, I asked, what more literal odyssey would there be than to investigate one’s own past lives, male and female? [...]

[...] One gifted Jane with a male dog—a Sheltie—from the city pound. [...]

Apart from my questions and speculations, I think it significant that Jane had waited until she had produced the first 207 sessions of the Seth material, over a period of a year and 11 months, before she really began to allow Seth to come through with outright personal material about her—as if first the two had to learn to know each other that well by bridging not only space but our historical or camouflage time. [...]

“Rob, do you think the community—Elmira—has any idea of the historical significance of this house, as far as Jane’s work goes?”