Session 773

Nature of the Psyche, Session 773

You have put sexual labels, then, on the intellect and the emotions, so that they seem like opposites to you.

You have tried to divide mental and emotional characteristics between the two sexes, forcing a stereotyped behavior.  Again, the male who was intuitively or artistically gifted in certain ways often therefore considered himself homosexual, whether or not he was, because his emotional and mental characteristics seem to fit the female rather than the male sex.

The woman who had interests beyond those acceptable as feminine was often in the same position.  Because the intellect and the emotions were considered so separately, however, attempts to express intuitive abilities often resulted in, and often do result in “unreasonable” behavior.

In certain circles now it is fashionable to deny the intellectual capacities in favor of feeling, sentiment, or intuitive actions.  Intellectual concerns then become suspect, and recourse to reason is considered a failing.  Instead, of course, intellectual and intuitive behavior should be beautifully blended.  In the same way you have attempted to force the expression of love into a purely – or exclusively – sexual orientation.  An affectionate caress or kiss between members of the same sex is generally not considered proper.  The taboos include most aspects of the sense of touch in connection with the human body.

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 eventually appear as a fact of experience.

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.

In fact, Western society has attempted to force all expression of love and devotion into sexual activity, or otherwise ban it entirely.  Sexual performance is considered the one safe way of using the great potential of human emotions.  When it seems to you that society is becoming licentious, in many ways it is most restrained and inhibited.

It means that all options except sexual freedom have been denied.  The great force of love and devotion is withdrawn from personal areas of individual creativity through purposeful work.  It is being withdrawn from expression through government or law.  It is being denied expression through meaningful personal relationships, and forced into a narrow expression through a sexuality that then will indeed become meaningless.

It has been said by some women working toward “equal rights” that the species has only used half of its potential by suppressing the abilities of women.  In larger terms, however, each individual suffers whenever identity is defined primarily as a matter of sexual orientation.

Generally speaking, there will be a specific overall sexual orientation of a biological nature, but the mental and emotional human characteristics are simply not meted out according to sex.  Such identification cuts the individual in half, so that each person uses but half of his or her potential.  This causes a schism in all of your cultural activities.

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 the 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.

The sexual schism begins when the male child is taught to identify exclusively with the father image, and the female child with the mother image – for here you have a guilt insidiously incorporated into the growth process.

Children of either sex identify quite naturally with both parents, and any enforced method of exclusively directing the child to such a single identification is limiting.  Under such conditions, feelings of guilt immediately begin to arise whenever such a child feels natural affiliations toward the other parent.

The stronger those natural inclinations are, the more the child is directed to ignore them in your society, since certain characteristics, again, are considered exclusively male or female.  The child is coerced into ignoring or denying those portions of the personality that correspond with the sex it is being taught it cannot identify with.  This squeezing of personality into a sexual mold begins early, then.  Continuing guilt is generated because the child knows unerringly that its own reality transcends such simple orientation.

The more able the child is to force such an artificial identification, the greater its feelings of inner rebellion.  The lack of a “suitable” father or mother image has “saved” more children than it has hurt.  The psyche, with its great gifts, always feels thwarted and attempts to take countering measures.  Your schools further continue the process, however, so that the areas of curiosity and learning become separated for males and females.  The “she” within the male does indeed represent portions of his personality that are being unexpressed – not because of any natural predominance of mental or emotional characteristics over others, but because of artificial specializations.  The same applies to the “male” within the female.  You have accepted this version of personhood, again, in line with your ideas about the nature of consciousness.  Those ideas are changing, and as they do the species must accept its true personhood.  As this happens, your understanding will allow you to glimpse the nature of the reality of the gods you have recognized through the ages.  You will no longer need to clothe them in limited sexual guises.

Your religious concepts will change considerably, and the images associated with them.  Religion and government have had an uneasy alliance.  Males ruled both (they still do), and yet those leading religious organizations at least recognized their intuitive base.  They constantly tried to manipulate religion’s substructure in the same acceptable male ways that government leaders always use to inhibit and use the emotions.

Heresy was considered female and subversive because it could threaten to destroy the frameworks set about the acceptable expression of religious fervor.  The female elements in the Church were always considered suspect, and in the early times of Christianity there was some concern lest the Virgin became a goddess.  There were offshoots of Christianity that did not survive, in which this was the case.  Parallel developments in religion and government always echo the state of consciousness and its purposes.  “Pagan” practices, giving far more leeway to sexual identification and expression, continued well into the 16^th century, and the so-called occult underground heretical teachings tried to encourage the development of personal intuition.

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.

The Church did not restrain the sexuality of its priests or the expression of sexuality in previous centuries as much as it tried to divorce the expression of love and devotion from sexuality.

A high percentage of priests of the Middle Ages, for example, had illegitimate children.  These considered products of the weak and lustful flesh – bad enough, but considering man’s fallen state, understandable lapses.  Such situations were overlooked, if not condoned, as long as the priest’s love and devotion still belonged to the Church and were not “squandered” upon the mother of such offspring.

The nuns were kept in subservient positions.  Yet the nunneries also served as refuges for many women, who managed to educate themselves even under those conditions.

A good number of nuns were of course carrying the seed of those priests, and bearing children who acted as servants in monasteries, sometimes, as well as in convents.  There were numerous rebellions on the part of nuns in various convents, however, for these women found themselves operating rather efficiently though in segregated surroundings.  They began to question the entire framework of the Church and their position within it.  Some left in groups, particularly in France and Spain, forming their own communities.

The Church, however, never really found a suitable method of dealing with its women, or with the intuitive elements of its own beliefs.  Its fear of a goddess emerging was renewed each time another apparition of the Virgin appeared on one corner or another of the world.

There were also some women who passed as monks, living lives of a solitary nature and carrying on for years.  No works bear their feminine names, for they used male ones.  It goes without saying that lesbian and homosexual relationships flourished in such surroundings.  The Church closed its eyes as long as the relationships were sexual in nature.  Only when love and devotion were diverted from the Church was there real concern.  Intellect and emotions became further divided then.  This resulted of course in an overemphasis upon dogma – rules and the ritualization that had to be colorful and rich because it would be the one outlet allowed in which creativity could be handled.  The Church believed that sexual experience belonged to the so-called lower or animal instincts, and so did usual human love.  On the other hand, spiritual love and devotion could not be muddied by sexual expression, and so any normal strong relationships became a threat to the expression of piety.

Session 772

Nature of the Psyche, Session 772

In a manner of speaking, humanity deals with different predominant themes at different times.  There may be minor interweaving ones, but the nature of personality, religion, politics, the family, and the arts – all of these are considered in the light of the predominating theme.

In usual historic terms, humanity has been experimenting with its own unique kind of consciousness, and as I have mentioned many times, this necessitated an arbitrary division between the subject and the perceiver – nature and man – and brought about a situation in which the species came to consider itself apart from the rest of existence.

What you think of as 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.

Those characteristics that you consider female are, then, those that did not predominate because they represented the source of nature from which the species sought release.  To some extent this was a true, creative, sexual drama – again, of high pretense, for in its own way the consciousness of the species was playing for high stakes, and the drama had to be believable.

It was seeking for a multiplication of consciousness, forming new offshoots from its own source.  It had to pretend to dislike and disown that source in the same way that an adolescent may momentarily turn aside from its parents in order to encourage independence.  Before the so-called flowering of Greek and Roman cultures, consciousness had not as yet made that specialization.  There were gods and goddesses galore, and deities in whose natures the feminine and masculine characteristics merged.  There were deities part human and part animal.  The species, then, had not yet taken up the theme that has been predominant in Western culture.

These changes first occurred in man’s stories of the deities.  As the species divorced itself from nature, so the animal gods began to vanish.  Man first changed his myths, and then altered the reality that reflected them.

Before then there were various kinds of divisions of labor, but great leeway in sexual expression.  Children were a necessary part of the family, for a family was a band of people who belonged together, cooperating in the search for food and shelter.

Homosexual or lesbian relationships, as you term them, existed quite freely, and simultaneously.  These were considered pertinent with or without sexual expression, and served as strong bonds of sisterhood and brotherhood.

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 specialities 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.

As a result, you see in nature only what you want to see, and you provide yourselves with a pattern or model of nature that conforms with your beliefs.

Love and devotions 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 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 “objective” thinker who takes great pains not to be emotional, or to identify with the subject being examined or studied.

There seems to be a division between science and religion, for even organized religion has an intuitive basis.  The male scientist is often ashamed of using his intuitions, for not only do they appear to be unscientific, but female as well.  It is what others will think about his masculinity that such a man is concerned with.  To be “illogical” is a scientific “crime” – not so much because it is an unscientific attribute, but because it is considered a feminine one.  Science has followed the male orientation and become its epitome.  Up until the present, science has consistently tried to do without the so-called feminine qualities.  It has divorced knowledge from emotion, understanding from identification, and stressed sexuality over personhood.

To an extent, some people in the sciences manage to blend the so-called female and male characteristics.  When they do so, seeming oppositions and contradictions disappear.  To whatever degree, more than their contemporaries, they do not allow sexual roles to blind them psychologically.  Therefore, they are more apt to combine reason and emotion, intuitions and intellect, and in so doing invent theories that reconcile previous contradictions.  They unify, expand and create, rather than diversify.

Einstein was such a person in the sciences.  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.  As a youngster particularly, he rebelled against male-oriented learning and orientation.  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.  The world felt the result of his great intuitive abilities, and of his devotion.

Because of the world situation, and the overall male orientation of science, the results of his work were largely put to the uses of manipulation and control.

Generally, reason and intellect are then considered male qualities, and the frameworks for civilization, science, and an organized world.  The intuitions and the impulses are considered erratic, untrustworthy, feminine, and to be controlled.  The world exists because of spontaneous order.  Civilization began because of the impulse of people to be together.  It grew spontaneously and came into order.  You only see the outside of many processes because your objectified viewpoint does not allow you the identification that would show you more.  It seems to you then that all systems sometimes break down – become less orderly or fall into chaos.

You apply this belief to physical systems and psychological ones.  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”.  It is you, then, who form the entire framework from which your judgment is made.  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.

Any deep exploration of the self will lead you into areas that will confound conventional beliefs about sexuality.  You will discover an identity, a psychological and psychic identity, that is in your terms male and female, one in which those abilities of each sex are magnified, released, and expressed.  They may not be so released in normal life, but you will meet the greater dimensions of your own reality, and at least in the dream state catch a glimpse of the self that transcends a one-sex orientation.

Such an encounter with the psyche is often met by great artists or writers, or by mystics.  This kind of realization is necessary if you are to ever transcend the framework of seeming opposites in which your world is involved.

The overly specific sexual orientation, then, reflects a basic division in consciousness.  It not only separates a man from his own intuitions and emotions to some extent, or a woman from her own intellect, but it effectively provides a civilization in which mind and heart, fact and revelation, appear completely divorced.  To some degree each person is at war with the psyche, for all of an individual’s human characteristics must be denied unless they fit in with those considered normal to the sexual identity.

To one degree or another in ordinary life, you end up with sexual caricatures in practical existence.

You do not understand what true womanhood or true manhood is.  You are forced instead to concentrate upon a shallow kind of diversity.  As a result, the reflection of sexual schism taints all of your activities, but most of all it limits your psychological reality.

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.  It is interesting to note that both the old and the young also find themselves outside of your organizational frameworks.  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.  There are of course exceptions.  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.  If children feel that identity is dependent upon such performance, then they will begin to perform as quickly as possible.  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.

Ideally, the adult male or female would rejoice in sexual expression and find an overall orientation, but would also bask in a greater psychological and psychic identity that experienced and expressed all of the great human capabilities of mind and heart, which splash over any artificial divisions.

Session 771

Nature of the Psyche, Chapter 5: The Psyche, Love, Sexual Expression, and Creativity

Session 771

Your ideas about sexuality and your beliefs about the nature of the psyche often paint a picture of very contradictory elements.  The psyche and its relationship to sexuality affects your ideas of health and illness, creativity, and all of the ordinary areas of individual life.  In this chapter, therefore, we will consider some of the implications that result.

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

In those terms and in that regard, the psyche is a bank from which sexual affiliations are drawn.  Basically, however, there are no clear, set, human, psychological characteristics that belong to one sex or the other.  Again, this would lead to a pattern too rigid for the development of the species, and give you too-specialized behavior patterns that would not allow you to cope as a species – particularly with the many varieties of social groupings possible.

Your psychological tests show you only the current picture of males and females, brought up from infancy with particular sexual beliefs.  These beliefs program the child from infancy, of course, so that it behaves in certain fashions in adulthood.  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.

It should be obvious to many of my readers that this is learned behavior.  You cannot teach a boy to be “the strong silent male type”, and then expect him to excel either verbally or in social relationships.  You cannot expect a girl to show “strong, logical thought development” when she is taught that a woman is intuitional – that the intuitions are opposed to logic, and that she must be feminine, or nonlogical, at all costs.  This is fairly obvious.

The child is not born a sponge, however, empty but ready to soak up knowledge.  It is already soaked in knowledge.  Some will come to the surface, so to speak, and be used consciously.  Some will not.  I am saying here that to some extent the child in the womb is aware of the mother’s beliefs and information, and that to some extent it is “programmed” to behave in a certain fashion, or to grow in a certain fashion as a result.

Basically the species is relatively so freewheeling, with so many potentials, that it is necessary that the mother’s beliefs provide a kind of framework in the beginning, allowing the child to focus its abilities in desired directions.  It knows ahead of time then the biological, spiritual, and social environment into which it is born.  It is somewhat prepared to grow in a certain direction – a direction that is applicable and suited to its conditions.

Beliefs about the infant’s sexual nature are of course a part of its advance programming.  We are not speaking here of forced growth patterns, or of psychic or biological directions, impressed upon it so that any later divergence from them causes inevitable stress or pain.  The fact remains that the child receives patterns of behavior, gently nudging it to grow in certain directions.  In normal learning, of course, both parents urge the child to behave in certain fashions.  Beside this, however, certain general learned patterns are biologically transmitted to the child through the genes.  Certain kinds of knowledge are transmitted through the genes besides that generally known, having to do with cellular formations and so forth.

Survival of the human species, as it has developed, is a matter of belief far more than is understood – for certain beliefs are now built in.  They become biologically pertinent and transmitted.  I mean something else here besides, for example, a telepathic transmission: the translation of beliefs into physical codes that then become biological cues.  [As a result], it then becomes easier for a boy to act in a given manner biologically than in another.

If women have felt that their biological survival depended upon the cultivation of certain attributes over others, for instance, then this information becomes chromosome data, as vital to the development of the new organism as any other physical data involving cellular structure.

The mother also provides the same kind of information to a male offspring.  The father contributes his share in each case.  Over the generations, then, certain characteristics appear to be quite naturally male or female, and these will vary to some extent according to the civilizations and world conditions.  Each individual is highly unique, however, so these models for behavior will vary.  They can indeed be changed in a generation, for the experience of each person alters the original information.  This provides leeway that is important.

The child, also, uses such information as a guide only; as a premise upon which it bases early behavior.  As the mind develops, the child immediately begins to question the early assumptions.  This questioning of basic premises is one of the greatest divisions between you and the animal world.

The psyche then contains, again in your terms, female and male characteristics.  These are put together, so to speak, in the human personality with great leeway and in many proportions.

As simply put as possible, love is the force out of which being comes, and we will consider this statement much more thoroughly later in this book.  Love seeks expression and creativity.  Sexual expression is one way that love seeks creativity.  It is hardly the only way, however.  Love finds expression through the arts, religion, play, and helpful actions toward others.  It cannot be confined to sexual expression only, nor can rules be given as to how often normal adults should sexually express themselves.

Many men, labeled homosexuals by themselves and others, want to be fathers.  Their beliefs and those of your society lead them to imagine that they must always be heterosexual or homosexual.  Many feel a desire toward women that is also inhibited.  Your male or female orientation limits you in ways that you do not understand.  For example, in many cases the gentle “homosexual” father has a better innate idea of manliness than a heterosexual male who believes that men must be cruel, insensitive, and competitive.  These are both stereotyped images, however.

Love can be expressed quite legitimately through the arts.  This does not mean that such a person is repressing sexuality in any given case, and stealing its energy for creative production – though, of course, this may be the case.  Many natural artists in any field normally express love through such creative endeavors, rather than through sexual actions.

This does not mean that such persons never have sexual encounters that are enjoyable, and even of an enduring nature.  It means that the thrust of their love is, overall, expressed through the production of art, through which it seeks a statement that speaks in other than corporal terms.

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.  Each person will generally find it easier to operate as male or female, lesbian or homosexual, but each person is primarily bisexual.  Bisexuality implies parenthood as much as it implies lesbian or homosexual relationships.  Again, here, sexual encounters are a natural part of love’s expression, but they are not the limit of love’s expression.

Many quite fine nonsexual relationships are denied, because of the connotations placed upon lesbianism or homosexuality.  Many heterosexual relationships are also denied to persons labeled as not being heterosexual, by themselves or society.  People so labeled often feel propelled out of sheer confusion to express their love only through sexual acts.  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.

In some historical periods it was desirable in practical terms that a man have many wives, so that if he died in battle his seed might be planted in many wombs – particularly in times when diseases struck men and women down often in young adulthood.

When physical conditions are adverse, such social traditions have often emerged.  In times of overpopulation, so-called homosexual and lesbian tendencies come to the surface – but also there is the tendency to express love in other than physical ways, and the emergence of large social issues and challenges into which men and women can throw their energies.  There are “lost” portions of the Bible having to do with sexuality, and with Christ’s beliefs concerning it, that were considered blasphemous and did not come down to you through history.

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.  The complexes and neuroses outlined and defined are products of your traditions and beliefs.  You will naturally find some evidence for them in observed behavior.  Many of the traditions do come from the Greeks, from the great Greek play-writers, who quite beautifully and tragically presented the quality of the psyche as it showed itself in the light of the Grecian traditions.

The boy does not seek, naturally, to “dethrone” the father.  He seeks to emulate him; he seeks to be himself as fully as it seems to him that his father was himself.  He hopes to go beyond himself and his own capabilities for himself and for his father.

As a child he once thought that his father was immortal, in human terms – that he could do no wrong.  The son tries to vindicate the father by doing no wrong himself, and perhaps by succeeding where it seems the father might have failed.  It is much more natural for the male to try to vindicate the father than it is to destroy him, or envy him in negative terms.

The child is simply the male child.  He is not jealous of the father with the mother, in the way that is often supposed.  The male child does not possess an identity so focused upon its maleness.  I am not saying that children do not have a sexual nature from birth.  They simply do not focus upon their maleness or femaleness in the way that is supposed.

To the male child, the penis is something that belongs to him personally in the same way that an arm or leg does, or that his mouth or anus does.  He does not consider it a weapon.  He is not jealous of his father’s love for the mother, for he understands quite well that her love for him is just as strong.  He does not wish to possess his mother sexually in the way that adults currently suppose.  He does not understand those terms.  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 do enjoy their bodies.  They are sexually aroused.  The psychological connotations, however, are not those assigned to them by adults.

The beliefs involving the son’s inherent rivalry with the father, and his need to overthrow him, follow instead patterns of culture and tradition, economic and social, rather than biological or psychological.  Those ideas serve as handy explanations for behavior that is not inherent or biologically pertinent.

Session 770

Nature of the Psyche, Session 770

Your identity is simply not dependent upon your psychological or biological sexuality.

Your sexual characteristics represent a portion of your personhood.  They provide vital areas of expression, and focal points about which to group experience.  Your sexual qualities are a part of your nature, but they do not define it.

Your beliefs so structure your experience individually and en masse, however, that evidential material contrary to those ideas shows itself but seldom, or in distorted or exaggerated form.  It is quite natural, biologically and psychologically, to operate in certain fashions that are not acceptable in your society, and that seem to run counter to your picture of mankind’s history.  In terms of your definitions, then, it is quite natural for some people to behave as males sexually and as females psychologically.  It is quite “natural” for others to operate in a reverse fashion.

Again, this may seem difficult to understand, because you assign psychological characteristics to sexual affiliation, whichever it is.  There will always be people who naturally seek the experience of parenthood.  All of them will not necessarily be heterosexual at any given time.

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 the sexual stereotypes.  I am not speaking here of anything so simple as merely allowing women more freedom, or relieving men from the conventional breadwinner’s role.  I am certainly not talking about “open marriage” as it is currently understood, but of far greater issues.  Before we can consider these, however, there are several points I would like to make.

There are biological possibilities, seldom activated in your present circumstances, that have some bearing upon the subject at hand.

Puberty comes at a certain time, triggered by deep mechanisms that are related to the state of the natural world, the condition of the species, and those cultural beliefs that in a certain sense you transpose upon the natural world.  In other respects, your cultural environment is of course natural.  The time that puberty comes varies, then, and afterwards it is possible to parent a child.  A time then comes when the period is over.  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.  The fact is that few people fit those roles.  They are largely the result of the interpretations of religion as conventionally understood.  And the scientists, for all their seeming independence, often simply found new intellectually acceptable reasons for unconsciously held emotional beliefs.

Biologically there is a period very rarely experienced, as joking suggested in the “sick jokes” about senility and second childhood.  This particular latent biological ability shows itself upon the rarest instances – because, for one thing, it represents a feat now scarcely desirable.  Physically, however, the body is quite able to completely regenerate itself as it approaches old age.  Indeed, a quite legitimate second puberty is possible, in which the male’s seed is youthfully strong and vital, and the woman’s womb is pliable and able to bear.  There are, I believe, Biblical tales of such births resulting.

In times of overpopulation, this mechanism is hardly desirable, but it is a part of the species held in abeyance now, representing nature’s capabilities.  In some areas of your world, isolated peoples live on past a hundred years, vital and strong, because they are untouched by your beliefs, and because they live in sympathy and accord with the world as they know and understand it.  Occasionally such second puberties happen then, with resulting childbirth, as a small group attempts to maintain its own biological stance.

Usually the second puberty follows the same sexual orientation as the first, but not always – for it is quite possible for the new affiliation to be the opposite of the first.  This is even rarer – but so does the species protect itself.

Through medical techniques some of your old people are kept alive long enough that this process begins, appearing in distorted form, sometimes psychologically apparent but biologically frustrated.  The second puberty is dead-ended, then.  It has nowhere to go.  It is not now biologically pertinent or needed.

Left alone, some of these people would die with a feeling of satisfaction.  Kept alive through medical techniques, the physical mechanism continues its struggles to revitalize the body and bring about this second puberty – that naturally would only come about under different conditions, with the mind far more alert and the will unimpaired.  Now, to some extent, there is a connection between this innate, rarely observed second puberty and the development of cancer, in which growth is specifically apparent in an exaggerated manner.

In almost all such cases involving cancer, spiritual and psychic growth is being denied, or the individual feels that he or she can no longer grow properly in personal, psychic, terms.  This attempt to grow then activates body mechanisms that result in the overgrowth of certain cells.  The individual insists upon growing or upon death, and forces an artificial situation in which growth itself becomes physically disastrous.

This is because a blockage occurs.  The individual wants to grow in terms of personhood, but is afraid of doing so.  There are always individual variations that must be taken into consideration, but often such a person feels a martyr to his or her sex, imprisoned by it and unable to escape.  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.

Now, old people who are considered senile or unmanageable are sometimes experiencing new bursts of sexual activity for which no outlet is given.  Beside this, they have lost their conventional sexual roles, in which they earlier expressed their energy.

There are often hormonal changes occurring that go unnoticed.  Many express a nervous, erratic type of behavior as they are aroused – some not only sexually but intellectually.  The new adolescence never comes.  The new puberty dies a slow death, for your society has no framework in which to understand it.  And indeed it shows itself in a distorted fashion that can appear most grotesque.

Love is a biological necessity, a force operating to one degree or another in all biological life.  Without love there is no physical commitment to life – no psychic hold.

Love exists whether or not it is sexually expressed, though it is natural for love to seek expression.  Love implies loyalty.  It implies commitment.  This applies to lesbian and homosexual relationships, as well as to heterosexual ones.  In your society, however, identity is so related to sexual stereotypes that few people know themselves well enough to understand the nature of love, and to make any such commitments.

A transitory period is currently taking place, in which women seem to seek the promiscuous sexual freedom more generally granted to men.  It is believed that males are naturally promiscuous, aroused by sexual stimuli almost completely divorced from any complementary “deeper” response.  The male, then, is thought to want sex whether or not he has any love response to the woman in question – or sometimes to desire her precisely because he does not love her.  In such cases, sex becomes not an expression of love, but an expression of derision or scorn.

So women, accepting these ideas often, seek for a situation in which they too can feel free to express their sexual desires openly, whether or not any love is involved.  Yet loyalty is love’s partner, and the primates display such evidence in varying degrees.  The male in particular has been taught to separate love and sex, so that a schizophrenic condition results that tears apart his psyche – in operational terms – as he lives his life.

The expression of sexuality is considered male, while the expression of love is not considered manly.  To some extent or another, then, the male feels forced to divide the expression of his love from the expression of his sexuality.  It would be disastrous for women to follow the same course.

This great division has led to your major wars.  This does not mean that men were alone responsible for wars.  It does mean that the male so divorced himself from the common fountain of love and sex that the repressed energy came forth in those aggressive acts of cultural rape and death, instead of birth.

When you look at the animal kingdom, you suppose that the male chooses blindly, led by “dumb” instinct, so that in overall terms one female will do as well as any other.  When you discover that a certain chemical or scent will attract a certain male insect, for example, you take it for granted that that element is alone responsible for drawing the male to the female.  You take it for granted, in other words, that individual differences do not apply in such cases so remote from your own reality.

You simply are not able to understand the nature of such consciousnesses, and so you interpret their behavior according to your beliefs.  This would be sad enough if you did not often use such distorted data to further define the nature of male and female behavior.

In so distorting your ideas of sex, you further limit the great capacities of human loyalty, which is always connected with love and love’s expression.  Lesbian and homosexual relationships then are at best tenuous, overwrought with confused emotions, very seldom able to maintain a stability that allows for individual growth.  Heterosexual relationships also break down, for the identity of each partner becomes based upon sexual roles that may or may not apply to the individuals involved.

Since you feel that sex is the only proper method of love’s expression, and yet also believe that sex and love are divided, you are in a quandary.  These sexual beliefs are also far more important in national relationships than you realize, for you attempt to take what you think of as a masculine stance as a nation.  So, for example, does Russia.  India takes a feminine stance – in terms of your beliefs now.

One small note: A male with growths of any kind – kidney stones or ulcers, for example – has tendencies he considers feminine, and therefore “dependent”, of which he is ashamed.  In a mock biological ceremony, he gives birth to the extent that he produces within his body material that was not there before.  In ulcers the stomach becomes the womb – bloodied, giving birth to sores – his interpretation of a male’s “grotesque” attempt to express feminine characteristics.

Session 769

Nature of Personal Reality, Session 769

The so-called battle of the sexes, with its ramifications, is not “natural” – nor, in that context, is fighting between members of the same sex.  Even in the animal kingdom, for example, males do not fight to the death over the females when they are in their natural state.

I will clear up my meaning of the word “natural” later.  However, when you examine animal behavior even in its most natural-seeming environment, for instance, you are not observing the basic behavior patterns of such creatures, because those relatively isolated areas exist in your world.  Quite simply, you cannot have one or two or twenty officially-designated natural regions in which you observe animal activity, and expect to find anything more than the current adaptation of those creatures – an adaptation that is superimposed upon their “natural” reactions.

The balance of resources, animal travel patterns, migrations, weather conditions – all of these must be taken into consideration.  Such isolated observation areas merely present you with a distorted picture of natural behavior, because the animals are also imprisoned within them.  Civilization binds them round.

Other animals are kept out.  The hunted and the prey are highly regulated.  All areas of animal behavior alter to fit the circumstances as much as possible, and this includes sexual activity.  To some extent the animals have been conditioned to a changing world.  Now man is obviously part of nature, so you may say: But those changes wrought by him are natural”.  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.

It is not natural, then, for men to fight over women.  This is a purely cultural, learned behavior.  In terms of history as you understand it, the species could not withstand such misapplied energy, nor could it have withstood such constant antagonism.

Each species is involved in a cooperative venture, upon which ultimately all earthly existence rests.  You project your present beliefs backward into history, and you misinterpret many of the conditions that you observe in the natural world.  This cooperation that I speak of is based on love, and that love has a biological as well as a spiritual basis.  Your beliefs, for example, cause you to deny the existence of emotions in animals, and any instances of love among them are assigned to “blind” instinct.

To some extent the churches as well as the scientists are responsible, but priests and scientists are not some foreign people, thrust upon you.  They represent various aspects of yourselves.  The species developed its own kind of consciousness, as it found it necessary to isolate itself to some degree from its environment and the other creatures within it.  As a result, the religions preached that only man had a soul and was dignified by emotional feelings.  In its way science went along very nicely by postulating man in a mechanistic world, with each creature run by an impeccable machine of instinct, blind alike to pain or desire.

The love and cooperation that forms the basis of all life, however, shows itself in many ways.  Sexuality represents one aspect, and an important one.  In larger terms, it is as natural for a man to love a man, and for a woman to love a woman, as it is to show love for the opposite sex.  For that matter, it is more natural to be bisexual.  Such is the “natural” nature of the species.

Instead, you have put love into very definite categories, so that its existence is right only under the most limited conditions.  Love goes underground, but springs up in distorted forms and exaggerated tendencies.  You have followed this course for different reasons at different times.  Neither sex is to blame.  Instead, your sexual situation is simply another reflection of the state of your consciousness.  As a species, presently at least in the Western world, you equate sex and love.  You imagine that sexual expression in the only one natural to love.  Love, in other words, must, it seems, express itself exclusively through the exploration, in one way or another, of the beloved’s sexual portions.

This is hardly the only limitation placed upon love’s expression, however.  There are innumerable books written with instructions, each proclaiming the said methods to be the proper ones.  Certain kinds of orgasm are “the best”.  Love’s expression is furthermore permitted only between members of the opposite sex.  Generally speaking, these individuals must be more or less of the same age.  There are other taboos, involving racial restrictions, or cultural, social, and economic ones.  If this were not enough, large segments of the population believe that sex is wrong to begin with – a spiritual debasement, allowed by God only so that the species can continue.

Since love and sex are equated, obvious conflicts arise.  Mother love is the only category that is considered wholesome, and therefore nonsexual under most conditions.  A father can feel very guilty about his love for his children, for he has been conditioned to believe that love is expressed only through sex, or else it is unmanly, while sex with one’s children is taboo.

Creativity rides the tides of love.  When love is denied its natural expression, creativity suffers.  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.  I would say, however, that my last sentence adequately describes your present situation.  The acceptance of the species’ natural bisexuality would ultimately help solve not only those problems but many others, including the large instances of violence, and acts of murder.  In your terms, however, and in your circumstances, there is not apt to be an easy transition.

The parent-child relationship has its own unique emotional structure, which survives even those distortions you have placed upon it, and its ancient integrity would not be weakened, but strengthened, if greater stress were laid upon your bisexual nature.

Children would fare far better if the ancient parental qualities were not so forcibly focused upon the mother.  This in itself leads to more dependence upon the mother than is healthy, and forms an artificial allegiance between mother and child against the father.

Heterosexual love is one important expression of bisexuality, and sexually represents the reproductive abilities.  Heterosexuality, however, rests upon the bisexual basis, and without man’s bisexual nature, the larger frameworks of the family – the clan, tribe, government, civilization – would be impossible.

Basically, then, man’s inherent bisexuality provides the basis for the cooperation that makes physical survival, and any kind of cultural interaction, possible.  If the “battle of the sexes” were as prevalent as supposed, and as natural and ferocious, then there literally would be no cooperation between males and females for any purpose.  There would be none between men or between women either, for they would be in a constant state of battle against each other.

In the natural biological flow of a person’s life, there are periods of varying intensities, in which love and its expression fluctuates, and tends toward different courses.  There are also individual variations that are of great importance.  These natural rhythms are seldom observed, however.  Tendencies toward lesbianism or homosexuality in children are quite natural.  They are so feared, however, that often just-as-natural leanings toward heterosexuality are blocked.  Instead, the young person is stereotyped.

Individual inclinations toward creativity often emerge in a strong fashion in adolescence.  If those drives in either sex do not conform in expression to those expected of the male or female, then such young persons become confused.  The creative expression seems to be in direct contradiction to the sexual standards expected.

I am not saying that lesbianism and homosexuality are merely stages leading to heterosexuality.  I am saying that lesbianism, homosexuality, and heterosexuality are valid expressions of man’s bisexual nature.

I am also stressing the fact that love and sexuality are not necessarily the same thing.  Sex is love’s expression, but it is only one of love’s expressions.  Sometimes it is quite “natural” to express love in another way.  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”.

Instead, I am saying that deeper bonds of biological and spiritual love lie at the basis of all personal and cultural relationships, a love that transcends your ideas of sexuality.  Heterosexual love, as it is understood at least, gives you a family of parents and children – an important unit, about which other groups form.  If only stereotyped ideas of female-male relationships operated, however, there would be no bond or stimulus great enough to forge one family to another.  The antagonism between males would be too great.  Competition between females would be too severe.  Wars would wipe out struggling tribes before any traditions were formed.

In the social world as in the microscopic one, cooperation again is paramount.  Only a basic bisexuality could give the species the leeway necessary, and prevent stereotyped behavior of a kind that would hamper creativity and social commerce.  That basic sexual nature allows you the fulfillment of individual abilities, so that the species does not fall into extinction.  Man’s recognition of his bisexual nature is, therefore, a must in his future.

There are, again, obvious differences between the sexes.  They are insignificant, and appear large only because you concentrate so upon them.  The great human qualities of love, strength, compassion, intellect and imagination do not belong to one sex or the other.

Only an understanding of this inherent bisexual nature will release those qualities in each individual, regardless of sex.  Those same abilities are natural characteristics of people in each race, of course, yet you have consistently made the same kind of distinctions in racial terms as you have in sexual ones, so that certain races appear as feminine or masculine to you.  You project your sexual beliefs outward upon the nations, then, and often the terminology of the nations and of wars is the same as that used to describe sex.

You speak, for example, of domination and submission, of the master and the slave, of the rape of a nation – terms used in war and sex alike.

Male and female are each members of the human race – or species if you prefer – so these divisions were made in the species itself, by itself.  They are the result of distinctions arising, again, as the species experimented with its line of consciousness and brought into being the appearance of separation between itself and the rest of the natural world.

Session 768

Nature of the Psyche, Session 768

Your beliefs about sexuality, and hence your experience with it, makes you consider it in a very limiting light.  The psyche’s own knowledge, of course, is far more expansive.  Alterations of consciousness, or attempts on the part of the individual to explore the inner self, may then easily display glimpses of a kind of sexuality that can appear to be deviant or unnatural.

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.  These variations appear in your world on only fairly microscopic levels, or in the behavior of other species than your own.

When racial conditions require it, it is quite possible for an individual to father and mother a child.  In such cases, what you would call complete spontaneous sexual reverses or transformations would occur.  Such processes are quite possible at microscopic levels, and inherent in the cellular structure.  Even in your world, currently speaking, some individuals known as women could father their own children.

Some individuals known as men could give birth to a child fathered by the same person – could. The abilities are there.

The male-female, female-male orientation is not nearly as separate as it appears to be in your present experience.  It is not nearly as tied to psychological characteristics as you suppose.  Nor is it inherently focused in the particular age period in which it now shows itself.  Puberty arrives, so to speak, but the time of its arrival varies according to the needs of the species, its conditions and beliefs. You are an individual for life.  You operate as a reproducing individual, generally speaking, for only a portion of that time.

During that period, many elements come into play and are meant to make the process attractive to the individuals involved, and to their tribes, societies, or civilizations.  A relatively strong “sexual” identification is important under those circumstances – but an over-identification with them, before or afterward, can lead to stereotyped behavior, in which the greater needs and abilities of the individual are not allowed fulfillment.

All of this becomes very complicated because of your value judgments, which oftentimes seem to lack – if you will forgive me – all natural common sense.  You cannot separate biology from your own belief systems.  The interplay is too vital.  If each act of intercourse were meant to produce a child, you would have overrun the planet before you began.  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.  In those cultures, such taboos make good sense.  Such peoples, building up the human stock, intuitively knew that the population would be increased if relations were restricted to periods when conception was most likely to occur.  The blood was an obvious sign that the woman at here period was relatively “barren”.  Her abundance was gone.  It seemed to their minds that she was indeed “cursed” during that time.

I have spoken before about the growth of what you call ego-consciousness – which, let me reiterate, has its own unique rewards.  That psychological orientation will lead the species to another, equally unique kind of consciousness.

When the process began, however, the deep power of nature had to be “controlled” so that the growing consciousness could see itself as apart from this natural source.  Yet children, so necessary to the species, continued to spring from women’s wombs.  Therefore, the natural source was most flagrant, observable, and undeniable.  For that reason, the species – and not the male alone – placed so many taboos about female behavior and sexuality.  In “subduing” its own female elements, the species tried to gain some psychological distance from the great natural source from which it was, for its own reasons, trying to emerge.

In the world of your present experience, sexual differences are less apparent as you reach old age.  Some women display what you think of as masculine characteristics, growing hair about their faces, speaking with heavier voices, or becoming angular; while some men speak with lighter, gentler tones than ever before, and their faces grow smoother, and the contours of their bodies soften.

Before puberty there is the same kind of seeming ambiguity.  You stress the importance of sexual identification, for it seems to you that a young child must know that it will grow up to be a man or woman, in the most precise of terms – toeing the line in the least particular.

The slightest deviation is looked upon with dismay, so that personal identity and worth are completely tied into identification with femaleness or maleness.  Completely different characteristics, abilities, and performances are expected from those in each category.  A male who does not feel himself fully male, therefore, does not trust his identity as a person.  A woman doubtful of her complete femininity in the same manner does not trust the integrity of her personhood.

A lesbian or homosexual is on very shifting psychological ground, because the same interests and abilities that they feel most personally theirs are precisely those that mark them as sexual eccentrics.

These are simple enough examples, but the man who possesses interests considered feminine by your culture, who naturally want to enter fields of interest considered womanly, experiences drastic conflicts between his sense of personhood and identity – and his sexuality as it is culturally defined.  The same, of course, applies to women.

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.  It can lead to acts that do not produce children.  What you think of as lesbian or homosexual activity is quite natural sexual expression, biologically and psychologically.  In more “ideal” environments such activity would flourish to some extent, particularly before and after prime reproductive years.

For those literal-minded readers, this does not mean that such activity would predominate at such times.  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 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.

Lesbianism and homosexuality, as they are currently experienced, also represent exaggerated versions of natural inclinations, even as your experienced version of heterosexuality is exaggerated.