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.