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.