“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(10:05.) Give us a moment… On the one hand many of you have been taught that sexual expression is wrong, evil, or debasing. You have also been told that if you do not express your sexuality, you are displaying unnatural repression, and furthermore you are led to think that you must above all force yourself to enjoy this ambiguous sexual nature. The old idea that good women do not enjoy sex has hardly disappeared. Yet women are taught that natural expressions of love, playful caresses, are inappropriate unless an immediate follow-through to a sexual climax is given. Men are taught to count their worth according to the strength of the sexual drive and its conquests. They are taught to inhibit the expression of love as a weakness, and yet to perform sexually as often as possible. In such a sexual climate there is little wonder that you become confused.

Any true psychic development of personality, however, is bound to lead to an understanding of the nature of the psyche that is far too large for any such confusion of basic identity with sexuality. The concept of reincarnation itself clearly shows the change of sexual orientation, and the existence of a self that is apart from its sexual orientation, even while it is also expressed through a given sexual stance. To a good extent, sexual beliefs are responsible for the blocking-out of reincarnational awareness. Such “memory” would necessarily acquaint you with experiences most difficult to correlate with your current sexual roles. Those other-sex existences are present to the psyche unconsciously. They are a portion of your personality. In so specifically identifying with your sex, therefore, you also inhibit memories that might limit or destroy that identification.

This also forces you to guard your emotional life very closely. As a result, any show of love is to some extent inhibited unless it can legitimately find expression sexually. In many instances love itself seems wrong because it must imply sexual expression at times when such expression is not possible, or even desired. Some people have a great capacity for love, devotion, and loyalty, which would naturally seek expression in many diverse ways — through strong enduring friendships, devotion to causes in which they believe, through vocations in which they help others. They may not be particularly sexually oriented. This need not mean that they are inhibiting their sexuality. It is pathetic and ludicrous for them to believe that they must have intercourse frequently in their youth, or to set up standards of normality against which they must measure their sexual experience.

Touching is considered so basically sexual that the most innocuous touching of any portion of the body by another person is considered potentially dangerous. On the one hand you are too specific in your use of the term “sexuality”; yet in another way, and in that context, you feel that any kind of affection must naturally lead to sexual expression, if given its way. Your beliefs make this sexual eventuality appear as a fact of experience.

Since you value sexual performance in the most limited of terms, and use that largely as a focus of identity, then both your old and young suffer consequences that are not so much the result of age as of sexual prejudice. [...] The young are more freewheeling in their thoughts before they accept sexual roles, and the old are more freewheeling in theirs because they have discarded their sexual roles. I did not say that old or young had no sexual expression — but that both groups did not identify their identities with their sexual roles. [...] If the man or the woman is taught that identity is a matter of sexual performance, however, and that that performance must cease at a certain age, then the sense of identity can also begin to disintegrate. [...] They will squeeze their identity into sexual clothes, and the society will suffer because the great creative thrusts of growing intellect and intuitions will be divided at puberty, precisely when they are needed.

[...] In terms of sex, you insist upon a picture that shows you a growth into a sexual identity, a clear focus, and then in old age a falling away of clear sexual identification into “sexual disorder.” It does not occur to you that the original premise or focus, the identification of identity with sexual nature, is “unnatural.” [...] In many cases the person is truer to his or her own identity in childhood or old age, when greater individual freedom is allowed, and sexual roles are more flexible.

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. [...] Animals have close friendships, with or without sexual expression, with members of the same sex. [...]

[...] While he was tainted to some extent by conventional sexual beliefs, he still felt his own personhood in such a way that he gladly took advantage of characteristics considered feminine. [...] This rebellion was psychological — that is, he maintained an acceptable male orientation in terms of sexual activity, but he would not restrain his mind and soul with such nonsense. [...]

Even when social scientists or biologists explore human sexuality, they do so from the framework of sexuality as it appears in your world. There are quite natural sexual variations, even involving reproduction, that are not now apparent in human behavior in any culture. [...]

[...] Sexual activity is therefore also meant as enjoyment, as an expression of pure exuberance. A woman will often feel her most sexually active in the midst of the menstrual period, precisely when conception is least apt to occur. All kinds of taboos against sexual relations have been applied here, particularly in so-called native cultures. [...]

Because of your exaggerated focus, you therefore become relatively blind to other aspects of “sexuality.” First of all, sexuality per se does not necessarily lead to intercourse. [...] What you think of as lesbian or homosexual activity is quite natural sexual expression, biologically and psychologically. [...]

[...] It does mean that not all sexual activity is meant to end in childbirth — which is a biological impossibility, and would represent planetary catastrophe. So the species is blessed, if you will (louder) with many avenues for sexual expression. The strong focus that now predominates does inhibit the formation of certain kinds of friendships that would not necessarily at all result in sexual activity.

[...] He does not wish to possess his mother sexually in the way that adults currently suppose. [...] He may at times be jealous of her attention, but this is not a sexual jealousy in conventionally understood terms. Your beliefs blind you to the sexual nature of children. [...] They are sexually aroused. [...]

[...] Sexual expression is one way that love seeks creativity. [...] It cannot be confined to sexual expression only, nor can rules be given as to how often normal adults should sexually express themselves.

A great artist in any field or in any time instinctively feels a private personhood that is greater than the particular sexual identity. As long as you equate identity with your sexuality, you will limit the potentials of the individual and of the species. [...] Again, here, sexual encounters are a natural part of love’s expression, but they are not the limit of love’s expression.

Again, it is natural to express love through sexual acts — natural and good. It is not natural to express love only through sexual acts, however. Many of Freud’s sexual ideas did not reflect man’s natural condition. [...]

[...] This can obviously apply to cancers affecting sexual areas, but is often in the background of any such condition. Energy is being blocked because of problems that began — in your terms — with sexual questions in puberty. Energy is experienced as sexual.

Your sexual characteristics represent a portion of your personhood. [...] Your sexual qualities are a part of your nature, but they do not define it.

The larger pattern of human personhood demands a bisexual affiliation that allows leeway in sexual encounters, a leeway that provides a framework in which individuals can express feelings, abilities, and characteristics that follow the natural inclines of the personal psyche rather than sexual stereotypes. [...]

[...] During what is called the sexually active time; the larger dimensions of personhood become strictly narrowed into sexually stereotyped roles — and all aspects of identity that do not fit are ignored or denied. [...]

I am not saying here that any given sexual performance is “wrong,” or meaningless, or debased, if it is not accompanied by the sentiments of love and devotion. [...] These inclinations will color sexual expression, then. To that degree, it is “unnatural” to have sexual desire for someone whom you dislike or look down upon. The sexual ideas of domination and submission have no part in the natural life of your species, or that of the animals. [...]

Dictation: You are obsessed with sexual behavior when you proclaim it evil or distasteful or debasing, hide it, and pretend that it is primarily “animalistic.” You are also obsessed with sexual behavior when you proclaim its merits in an exaggerated fashion from the marketplace. You are obsessed with sexual behavior when you put tight, unrealistic bans upon its expression, and also when you set up just as unrealistic standards of active performance to which the normal person is expected to comply.

You begin to program sexual activity when you divorce it from love and devotion. It is very easy then for church or state to claim and attract your uncentered loyalty and love, leaving you with the expression of a sexuality stripped of its deepest meanings.

Dominance and submission have often been used in religious literature in periods when love and devotion were separated from sexuality. They became unified only through religious visions or experiences, for only God’s love was seen as “good enough” to justify a sexuality otherwise felt to be animalistic. [...]

People in the sports arena also often encourage the concept that sexual expression is somehow debilitating to the male, and can weaken his constitution. Priests take vows to ensure sexual abstinence. The fact is that sexual expression is, again, an important element in the entire range of human experience, encouraging mental and physical health and vitality.

[...] Damned up, such sexuality still keeps trying for expression, and it is often men of habitual “sexual discipline” who suddenly break out in bouts of sexual promiscuity or violence.

Many schools of religion and so-called esoteric knowledge have promoted the idea that sexuality and spirituality were diametrically opposed to each other.

[...] To abstain from sexuality then means to store up one’s own power. [...]

[...] All areas of animal behavior alter to fit the circumstances as much as possible, and this includes sexual activity. [...] When he studies such animal behavior, however, and sometimes uses the sexual patterns of the animals to make certain points about human sexuality, then man does not take this into consideration, but speaks as if the present observed animal behavior is the indication of a prime or basic nature inherent in their biology.

[...] Instead your sexual situation is simply another reflection of the state of your consciousness. [...] You imagine that sexual expression is the only one natural to love. Love, in other words, must it seems express itself exclusively through the exploration (humorously and deeper), in one way or another, of the beloved’s sexual portions.

[...] Your beliefs lead you to suppose that a natural bisexuality would result in the death of the family, the destruction of morals, rampant sexual crimes, and the loss of sexual identity. [...]

(Slowly at 10:54:) I am also stressing the fact that love and sexuality are not necessarily the same thing. [...] Because of the connotations of the word “sex,” however, it may seem to some of you that I am advocating a promiscuous sexual relationship with “no holes barred” (smile). [...]

Your ideas of sexuality follow both your religions and your sciences, then, for you have created each. [...] Regardless of what words are put upon your experience in terms of sexual roles, you will be a full human being. When the conscious and the unconscious minds are understood, you will have no more problems with sexuality.

Think of your ideas about your own sexuality in connection with those about your being and consciousness. Regroup your ideas so that you automatically think of sexuality in relationship to your religions and sciences. [...] You cannot, each of you, consider the real meaning of your own sexuality unless you understand your own religious history. [...]

Your sexuality is a point of focus, and that is all. [...] You chose your sexual focus for a reason. [...]

[...] You see a range of human being and personality that defies conventional ideas of sexuality or of consciousness — that defies all of the ideas that have been handed down to you, and that challenges you each to look for the reality of your own being.

Now: Distorted ideas about sexuality prevent many people from attaining any close connection with the inner experience that continually stirs beneath ordinary consciousness. It is a good idea, then, to look at the psyche and its relationship to sexual identity.

If your individuality was programmed by your biological sex, then it would be literally impossible for you to perform any action that was not sexually programmed. [...] Since you are otherwise free to perform other kinds of activity that you think of as sexually oriented, in those areas the orientation is cultural.

Even the animals, however, understand without words or language the importance of their sexual behavior. [...] The female understood the connections between the child born and the sexual act.

[...] Yet those myths contained a kind of knowledge that escapes your literal, specific interpretations of sexual events. [...] If you have any direct experience with your own psyche, then you will most likely find yourself encountering some kinds of events that will not easily fit with your own ideas about your sexual nature.

[...] You were rather repressed at that period, frightened about your own work, and sometimes you would ignore Ruburt’s occasional sexual advances when you happened to be in your studio. He felt he was too spontaneous, again, too impulsive—but then in that belief system he worried if his sexual needs could not be properly squashed, supposing someone else aroused them, and he “fell in love” with someone else as quickly as he had fallen in love with you. Or worse—supposing your repressed sexuality was repressed because of your joint work, and supposing you fell in love with someone else, and became sexually aroused for another?

[...] If you did not express your sexuality through sexual experience, as prescribed, you were in for trouble. [...] Ruburt as a woman, with those beliefs in the background, determined not to betray the writer, Jane, or the artist, Robert—thru becoming pregnant, or making too many sexual demands. [...]

[...] He refrained from heavy sexual encounters—certainly not the behavior of a sexually impulsive person. [...]

[...] You avoided heavy sexual relationships also. [...] Again, Freudian beliefs that filled the books and movies led you both in your own ways to fear that your energies could be “swallowed” by sexuality—that to some extent you had so much energy, and that most of it must go into creative work.

In Psyche, Seth addresses himself to the matter of human sexuality for the first time in his published works, discussing it as it relates to the private and mass psyche, and connecting sexuality with its spiritual and biological sources.

But Seth’s bisexuality is a far vaster concept than the ones usually suggested by that term, and he sees it as a basic source from which our sexual definitions arise. [...] More: He ties in his discussion of sexuality with the birth of languages and the nature of “the hidden God.”

[...] When I had classes, Seth gave many students their entity names also, and there was much lively discussion over the names’ sexual designations.

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.” [...]

Your present personalities need sexual fulfillment, but the main energy of your life is in other directions. This is why you did not marry young, Joseph, and why Ruburt first chose a man in whom he was not sexually interested. Your deep attraction in this life has strong sexual connotations that must and will be satisfied, but it goes beyond this. [...]

The psychic connections are indeed sexual ones, but interwound so deeply in your minds that the physical materialization of them is secondary. You are more a part of each other than you realize, and this common background of sexual knowledge is always latent within you both.

[...] You are sexually therefore attracted. [...]

The fact remains that neither of you sexually want children. [...]

All of the negative beliefs just mentioned touch upon sexuality in one way or another. Those with the beliefs just mentioned often think of sexuality as bestial, evil, and even humiliating.

We will have more to say on all of these issues — but now I want to discuss spontaneity, or its lack, in relationship to sexuality and health.

[...] You have, of course, a strong drive toward sexuality, and if you believe that it is to be shunned at the same time, then you are in a very ambiguous position. [...]

[...] The psyche, again, not only has no one sexual identification, but it is the larger psychic and psychological bank of potentials from which all gradations of sexuality emerge. [...]

The human personality is therefore endowed sexually and psychologically with a freedom from strict sexual orientation. [...]

[...] Adults censor many of their own dreams so that the frequent changes in sexual orientation are not remembered.

[...] The sexual symbols usually attached to dream images are highly simplistic, for example. [...]

The need is a sexual one—your sweet tooth—for your sexual feelings have been rearoused by your intimate encounters with Ruburt, even while neither of you thus far have even been willing to devote time to sexual gratification in the deepest terms.

[...] The sexual implications last evening, generally under several various areas of personality, could not have come into consciousness, for example, without the consent of the conscientious self, which says often “No work, no sex.” [...]

[...] Now the sexual area can serve as a great aid, and will be quite illuminating. [...]

[...] The drive, when it shows itself as last evening, is often irritating because the muscles and nerves connected have been so held back, instead of a clear flow of sexual energy then.

[...] The sexual area is charged for him for those reasons. [...]

[...] The fact is that Ruburt, working, attracts you sexually, and you working attract Ruburt sexually. [...]

[...] (Half humorously.) At the same time that these sexual feelings operated, the two of you have an extremely powerful psychic bond, and a hidden but definite sense of inner identity.

[...] Ruburt at that time tried to comfort you as a woman, through caresses, and offering frequent sexual comfort. [...]

[...] You felt it was depriving you, not only of, say, a private session if Ruburt did not hold the following regular one; you also felt that the sexual activity you were not getting from Ruburt was being channeled instead psychically where you were getting no benefit. [...]

Your own natural feelings toward him, your own natural sexual feelings, with their naturally allowed sexual gallantry, would clear that point. In the past, the long past, he discouraged your sexual gallantry in his concern for proving himself independent—and also, then, because he felt on the other hand that if he endorsed it you would feel that he was tacitly demanding conventional female protection. [...]

This is also based on cultural-sexual beliefs. [...] Both of you, however, were highly suspicious of sexuality in connection with your work, and you, Joseph, did feel it a trap, which is why you married late. [...]

[...] These gestures, these helping gestures, serve as sexual reassurance. [...]

(Pause.) Your dreams involving worries about sexuality actually represented, of course, worries about your worth as a contributing person, your sex and work being thus equated. Knowing that, had the eye affair been a dream, it could also be interpreted as a sexual regeneration. [...]

[...] No one we know was in the dream, and actually I recalled only the preliminary stages of the affair, not any actual sexual activity.