Session 774

Nature of the Psyche, Session 774

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.

Sexual freedom, then, does not involve an enforced promiscuity in which young people, for example, are made to feel unnatural if their encounters with the other sex do not lead to bed.

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.

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.  Over a period of time, however, the expression of sex will follow the inclinations of the heart.  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.  Again, you interpret animal behavior according to your own beliefs.

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.  Instead, the words “domination” and “submission” have to do with areas of consciousness and its development.  Because of interpretations mentioned earlier in this book, you adopted a prominent line of consciousness that to a certain extent was bent upon dominating nature.  You considered this male in essence.  The female principle then became connected with the earth and all those elements of its life over which you as a species hoped to gain power.

God, therefore, became male.  The love and devotion that might otherwise be connected with the facets of nature and the female principle had to be “snatched away from” any natural attraction to sexuality.  In such a way, religion, echoing your state of consciousness, was able to harness the powers of love and use them for purposes of domination.  They became state-oriented.  A man’s love and devotion was a political gain.  Fervor was as important as a government’s treasury, for a state could count upon the devotion of its lieutenants in the same way that many fanatics will work without money for a cause.

Some people are naturally solitary.  They want to live lone lives, and are content.  Most, however, have a need for enduring, close relationships.  These provide both a psychic and social framework for personal growth, understanding, and development.  It is an easy enough matter to shout to the skies: “I love my fellow men”, when on the other hand you form no strong, enduring relationship with others.  It is easy to claim an equal love for all members of the species, but love itself requires an understanding that at your level of activity is based upon intimate experience.  You cannot love someone you do not know – not unless you water down the definition of love so much that it becomes meaningless.

To love someone, you must appreciate how that person differs from yourself and from others.  You must hold that person in mind so that to some extent love is a kind of meditation – a loving focus upon another individual.  Once you experience that kind of love you can translate it into other terms.  The love itself spreads out, expands, so that you can then see others in love’s light.

Love is naturally creative and explorative – that is, you want to creatively explore the aspects of the beloved one.  Even characteristics that would otherwise appear as faults attain a certain loving significance.  They are accepted – seen, and yet they make no difference.  Because these are still attributes of the beloved one, even the seeming faults are redeemed.  The beloved attains prominence over all others.

The span of god’s love can perhaps equally hold within its vision the existences of all individuals at one time in an infinite loving glance that beholds each person, seeing each with all his or her peculiar characteristics and tendencies.  Such a god’s glance would delight in each person’s difference from each other person.  This would not be a blanket love, a soupy porridge of a glance in which individuality melted, but a love based on a full understanding of each individual.  The emotion of love brings you closest to an understanding of the nature of All That Is.  Love incites dedication, commitment.  It specifies.  You cannot, therefore, honestly insist that you love humanity and all people equally if you do not love one other person.  If you do not love yourself, it is quite difficult to love another.

Again, all love is not sexually oriented.  Yet love naturally seeks expression, and one such expression is through sexual activities.

When love and sexuality are artificially divided, however, or considered as antagonistic to each other, then all kinds of problems arise.  Permanent relationships become most difficult to achieve under such conditions, and often love finds little expression, while one of its most natural channels is closed off.  Many children give their greatest expression of love to toys, dolls, or imaginary playmates, because so many stereotyped patterns have already limited other expressions.  Their feelings toward parents become ambiguous as a result of the identification procedures thrust upon them.  Love, sexuality, and play, curiosity and explorative characteristics, merge in the child in a natural manner.  Yet it soon learns that areas of exploration are limited even as far as its own body is concerned.  The child is not free to contemplate its own parts.  The body is early forbidden territory, so that the child feels it is wrong to love itself in any fashion.

Ideas of love, then, become highly distorted, and its expression also.  You do not fight wars for the sake of the brotherhood of man, for example.  People who are acquainted with undistorted versions of love in their relationships would find such a concept impossible.  Men brought up to be ashamed of the “feminine” sides of their nature cannot be expected to love women.  They will see in women instead the despised, feared, and yet charged aspects of their own reality, and behave accordingly in their relationships.

Women taught to be frightened of the “masculine” sides of their nature cannot be expected to love men, either, and the same kind of behavior results.

The so-called war of the sexes originates in the artificial divisions that you have placed about the nature of the self.  The psyche’s reality is beyond such misunderstandings.  Its native language usually escapes you.  It is closely connected with what can be loosely called the language of love.

Chapter 6: “The Language of Love.”  Images and the Birth of Words

It is almost commonplace to say that those who are in love can converse without words.  Dramas and stories of all kinds have been written about the inner kind of communication that seems to take place between mother and children, sister and brother, or lover and beloved.

Love itself seems to quicken the physical senses, so that even the most minute gestures attain additional significance and meaning.  Myths and tales are formed in which those who love communicate, though one is dead while the other lives.  The experience of love also deepens the joy of the moment, even while it seems to emphasize the briefness of mortality.  Though love’s expression brilliantly illuminates its instant, at the same time that momentary brilliance contains within it an intensity that defies time, and is somehow eternal.

In your world you identify as yourself only, and yet love can expand that identification to such an extent that the intimate awareness of another individual is often a significant portion of your own consciousness.  You look outward at the world not only through your eyes, but also, to some extent at least, through the eyes of another.  It is true to say, then, that a portion of you figuratively walks with this other person as he or she goes about separate from you in space.

All of this also applies to the animals to varying degrees.  Even in animal groups, individuals are not only concerned with personal survival, but with the survival of “family” members.  Each individual in an animal group is aware of the other’s situations.  The expression of love is not confined to your own species, therefore, nor is tenderness, loyalty, or concern.  Love indeed does have its own language – a basic nonverbal one with deep biological connotations.  It is the initial basic language from which all others spring, for all languages’ purposes rise from those qualities natural to love’s expression – the desire to communicate, create, explore, and to join with the beloved.

Speaking historically in your terms, man first identified with nature, and loved it, for he saw it as an extension of himself even while he felt himself a part of its expression.  In exploring it he explored himself also.  He did not identify as himself alone, but because of his love, he identified also with all those portions of nature with which he came into contact.  This love was biologically ingrained in him, and is even now biologically pertinent.

Physically and psychically the species is connected with all of nature.  Man did not live in fear, as is now supposed nor in some idealized natural heaven.  He lived at an intense peak of psychic and biological experience, and enjoyed a sense of creative excitement that in those terms only existed when the species was new.

This is difficult to explain, for these concepts themselves exist beyond verbalization.  Some seeming contradictions are bound to occur.  In comparison with those times, however, children are now born ancient, for even biologically they carry within themselves the memories of their ancestors.  In those pristine eras, however, the species itself arose, in those terms, newly from the womb of timelessness into time.

In deeper terms their existence still continues, with offshoots in all directions.  The world that you know is one development in time, the one that you recognize.  The species actually took many other routes unknown to you, unrecorded in your history.  Fresh creativity still emerges at that “point”.  In the reckoning that you accept, the species in its infancy obviously experienced selfhood in different terms from your own.  Because this experience is so alien to your present concepts, and because it predated language as you understand it, it is most difficult to describe.

Generally, you experience the self as isolated from nature, and primarily enclosed within your skin.  Early man did not feel like an empty shell, and yet selfhood existed for him as much outside of the body as within it.  There was a constant interaction.  It is easy to say to you that such people could identify, say, with the trees, but an entirely different thing to try to explain what it would be like for a mother to become so a part of the tree underneath which her children played that she could keep track of them from the tree’s viewpoint, though she was herself far away.

Consciousness is far more mobile than you realize.  Operationally, you have focused yours primarily with the body.  You cannot experience subjective behavior “from outside”, so this natural mobility of consciousness, which for example the animals have retained, is psychologically invisible to you.

You like to think in terms of units and definitions, so even when you consider your own consciousness you think of it as “a thing”, or a unit – an invisible something that might be held in invisible hands perhaps.  Instead consciousness is a particular quality of being.  Each portion of “it” contains the whole, so theoretically as far as you are concerned, you can leave your body and be in it simultaneously.  You are rarely aware of such experiences because you do not believe them possible, and it seems that even consciousness, particularly when individualized, must be in one place or another.

I am certainly putting this in the most simple of terms, but a bird may have a nest, though it leaves it frequently and never confuses itself with its nesting place.  In a manner of speaking that is what you have done, though the body is more animate than the nest.

In those early times, then, consciousness was more mobile.  Identity was more democratic.  In a strange fashion this does not mean that individuality was weaker.  Instead it was strong enough to accept within its confines many divergent kinds of experience.  A person, then, looking out into the world of trees, waters and rock, wildlife and vegetation, literally felt that he or she was looking at the larger, materialized, subjective areas of personal selfhood.

To explore that exterior world was to explore the inner one.  Such a person, however, walking through the forest, also felt that he or she was also a portion of the inner life of each rock or tree, materialized.  Yet there was no contradiction of identities.

A man might merge his own consciousness with a running stream, traveling in such a way for miles to explore the layout of the land.  To do this he became part water in a kind of identification you can barely understand – but so did the water become part of the man.

You can imagine atoms and molecules forming objects with little difficulty.  In the same way, however, portions of identified consciousness can also mix and merge forming alliances.