Mike's commentary · The Nature of the Psyche, Chapter 5

The "Introduction" and "Chapter Highlights" in this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not words spoken by Mike during his lectures. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the block quotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).

Introduction

This chapter discusses the relationship between psyche, love, sexuality, and creativity. It points out that the psyche contains both male and female characteristics but is essentially neither male nor female, and that gendered behavior is largely shaped by beliefs, heredity, and social conditioning. Love is the force out of which existence arises, and sex is only one of the ways love seeks expression and creativity. Excessive gender identification splits reason and intuition, ego and psyche, limiting individual potential. It also touches on homosexuality, childhood sexual expression, the appropriation of love and devotion by religion and government, and the transcendence of gender identity in orgasm.

Key Points of This Chapter

• The psyche contains both male and female characteristics, but in itself it is neither male nor female; psychological traits do not belong exclusively to one sex.
• Gender behavior is largely learned through beliefs, heredity, and social conditioning; children are not born restricted to a single gender pattern.
• Love is the force out of which existence emerges, seeking expression and creativity; sex is only one path for love's expression, not the only way.
• Each person is fundamentally bisexual, and both male and female capacities should be released; excessive gender identification causes the individual to use only half of their potential.
• Assigning reason and intellect to the male, and intuition and emotion to the female, creates division within the individual and society; homosexuality and childhood sexual expression are thus misinterpreted.

Main Text

The Basic Relationship Between Sex and Spirituality

In the session on Wednesday, April 14, 1976, at 9:05 p.m., Seth began the discussion of Chapter Five. The theme of this chapter is the psyche, love, the expression of sexuality, and creativity. He came straight to the point, noting that humanity's concepts about sex, along with its beliefs about the nature of spirituality, often paint a picture containing very contradictory elements, and we feel very conflicted inside.

Session 771

The psyche and its relationship with sexuality affect your concepts of health and illness, creativity, and the ordinary scope of human individual life.

So having a correct understanding of sexuality will resolve many, many problems in our lives. This chapter mainly discusses sexuality, and the title of this chapter -- the psyche, love, the expression of sexuality, and creativity -- is precisely the unfolding of these themes.

Seth then said something that can be regarded as the key point of the entire book, and also the key point regarding sexuality and the psyche:

Again, in your terms, the psyche contains what you would consider male and female characteristics, while in itself it is non-male and non-female.

I hope everyone must have a deep understanding of this point. From the human perspective, we believe the psyche contains the characteristics of both male and female, and this is a fact; but fundamentally speaking, this psyche is neither male nor female. I already introduced this to everyone once in Chapter 4, and this time he is emphasizing it again. These two concepts have a very important difference; do not think they are the same concept.

In those terms, the psyche is a storehouse, a large warehouse, and the attributes of gender are drawn out from within it. This great warehouse of the psyche contains everything, including the male and female attributes as we humans understand them, all within it. But basically, there is no clearly fixed human or psychological characteristic that belongs exclusively to one particular gender. That is to say, things of a human nature or things of a psychological nature are more beyond gender.

If it were oriented by gender, that would be too rigid for human development -- it would give you overly specialized behavior patterns. What does specialized mean? It means your behavior is either a male behavior or a female behavior. This kind of pattern would make you as a species especially unable to cope with the many possible different social groups. Because between family and family, and between social organizations and social organizations, existence is necessarily cross-gender; they do not depend on gender. If people only considered issues from the perspective of gender, then apart from the family model, humanity would be unable to establish any social organization at all.

Learned Nature of Gender Behavior Patterns

Seth continued:

Your psychological tests only show your current picture of male and female, raised from childhood with specific sexual beliefs.

From childhood we are taught by our parents: as a boy you should behave this way, as a girl you should behave that way, and we are raised in that specific manner. These beliefs are naturally instilled into children, so that when they become adults they act according to certain patterns. Men seem to be better at mental activities involving mathematical problems and logical thinking, while women are more developed in social contexts, value development, and interpersonal relationships; men perform well in science, while women are considered to be more intuitive.

Many readers can clearly see that this is a learned behavior, acquired after birth, not innate.

You cannot teach a boy to become a strong, silent man, and then at the same time expect him to excel in language or social relationships.

You cannot expect a boy to be as silent as gold like a man, and then hope that he will be eloquent in society and have excellent interpersonal relationships. How can a taciturn person have good interpersonal relationships? He does not even communicate with others.

You cannot expect a girl to show strong development in the direction of logical thinking.

Because a girl is taught from childhood to be intuitive, and intuition is regarded as anti-logical, so she must at all costs make herself feminine rather than logical. When you criticize a girl for not being strong in logic, it is actually not her fault; it is what we humans have instilled in her -- she must protect her feminine tendency and show her intuitive, sensitive, emotional side. If she shows a strongly logical side, she is displaying her masculine side, which she is unwilling to admit.

A Child Is Not a Blank Slate

However, Seth says that a child is not born as a sponge. We think a small child is like a blank sheet of paper, ready to absorb knowledge, but this is actually not so.

A small child, as soon as it is born, is already filled with knowledge. The knowledge that floats up to the surface and is used by the conscious mind is what can surface; some knowledge does not surface.

So when this child comes, it is not coming to learn knowledge. Its knowledge is already complete; it only chooses which parts will surface and which parts will be actualized. All of these potentials are already there.

Moreover, to a certain degree, the child in the mother's womb has already intuitively sensed the mother's beliefs and information. In the fetal state, inside the mother's uterus, it can intuitively feel the mother's beliefs and information. To a certain extent, it is programmed to behave according to a certain pattern. So during pregnancy -- during what we often call the prenatal education period -- the child has already received some of the mother's beliefs and information about it, and therefore, as soon as it is born, it behaves and grows in a certain way.

Basically, human beings are by and large so free and possess so many potentials that a certain framework must be provided by the mother's beliefs.

The freedom of human beings is very great, and their potentials are unlimited. But after this person is born, in which way it will develop and toward which fields it will incline -- at this time the mother must provide a certain framework, giving the child a general structure so that its development has a general direction, allowing the child to concentrate its abilities in a desirable direction. Beforehand, it already knows the biological, spiritual, and social environment into which it will be born, and it is more or less prepared to grow in a certain direction -- a direction that is feasible for it and suited to its conditions. It must suit the family conditions, social conditions, biological conditions, and the conditions of the era at that time. Who gives it these conditions? Its mother gives them to it during pregnancy.

A person's potentials are unlimited. It could live in ancient times, and it could also live in modern times; it possesses all knowledge. So which knowledge will it actually use, and in what kind of era and what kind of social environment will it live? It cannot develop in an untimely way. This direction is provided by its mother -- because its mother lives in that era, and she knows what is restricted and what can be developed in that era. Therefore, the mother's expectations and outlook for the child are like providing a framework for the child's development.

These viewpoints were told to humanity for the first time by Seth. Before this, human beings had only vaguely known some of this, which is why we place so much importance on prenatal education. When we emphasize prenatal education, we think we should play music for the child and so on, but that is not really it. The best prenatal education, the most correct prenatal education, is for the mother to continuously converse with the fetus, to talk and chat with it, or to use her own beliefs to make good prospects and imaginings about the child's future. This way is the best.

Gender Beliefs and Genetic Factors

Seth continued:

His belief in the infant's sexual nature is, of course, part of the infant's preset programming.

Because this was already determined at the time of incarnation. But what we are talking about here is not a forced growth pattern, or a psychic or biological direction stamped upon him. Although a child has an innate belief in his sexual nature, this does not mean he is restricted to developing only as male, or only as female. It is not so rigidly fixed that any later deviation would inevitably lead to tension and suffering. For example, if you were originally a boy and you have feminine tendencies, this would not make you feel tense and pained — that is to say, you are given sufficient room and freedom to unfold.

The fact is that the child is receiving a gentle behavioral pattern that softly nudges him toward a certain direction of growth. The child's sexual nature is given a gentle push — saying you are a boy, but without reinforcing that you can only be a boy. In normal behavioral patterns, both parents also encourage the child to act according to certain behavioral modes. As soon as the child is born, the parents will say you are a boy, and the toys they buy for him are different from those for a girl — boys get cars, airplanes, guns, while girls get dolls and play-house things.

But apart from the parents' encouragement of the child, certain general learned patterns are biologically transmitted to the child through genetic factors. That is to say, when a boy is born, apart from his sex genes, he is also imprinted with the mark of a boy in the genes of other behavioral patterns.

Certain kinds of knowledge are also transmitted through genetic factors, having to do with things like cellular forms.

Apart from the genetic inheritance of cellular form — what he will grow up to look like, because the cells contain all the memories — he also inherits a sexual pattern, and this inheritance of the sexual pattern is given to the child by the parents through biological heredity without his knowing it. So sometimes people joke that this child looks more and more like his mother — not only in appearance, but also in expression and mannerisms; and some people say this person looks exactly like his father. These are all very interesting forms of inheritance.

Beliefs and Biological Inheritance

Seth points out:

As humanity has developed, human survival has been a matter connected with belief.

That human survival is connected with belief goes far beyond what is generally understood. Because certain beliefs are innate -- some people do not acquire them after birth; they are born with them. Certain beliefs become associated with old biological traits and are passed down, and this inheritance of habits, this inheritance of character, becomes biological. This is what our ancestors meant by "it is easy to change rivers and mountains but hard to change one's nature" -- a person's character is hard to change even if the rivers and mountains change. What Seth is pointing to is this kind of inheritance connected with biology.

He continues:

Therefore, I am not speaking of telepathic transmission, but of translating belief into a physical code that then becomes biological instruction. The result is that, biologically speaking, a boy will act in a certain predetermined manner.

What does it mean to translate belief into a physical code? I once saw a related introduction -- poverty is something you might consider a social attribute or an external attribute, but through scientific research (whether by psychologists or biologists), a particularly frightening phenomenon has been discovered: poverty really can be inherited¹. This inheritance is not behavioral inheritance, not inheritance of belief, but biological inheritance, which is extremely frightening. If both parents have a poverty mindset and a poverty mentality, their children will also be affected by it. Never underestimate this matter. We are not going to expand on this topic today, so I will stop here.

If you have children at home, you will find that many, many things are not taught by parents. For example, whether a child is considerate or withdrawn from an early age -- no one teaches him that. Some people's children are very sensible from a young age, and even before they can talk they already know how to take care of others; this kind of thing happens often. But other people's children are not like that. This kind of thing seems to be innate.

Seth gives an example:

If a woman has felt that her biological survival was dependent upon the cultivation of certain attributes over others, then this information would become chromosomal data, as vital to the development of the new organism as any physical data involving cellular structure.

Simply put, if a woman feels that certain attributes are the most basic element of her physical survival, she will embed them into her chromosomes, and in the process of inheritance they will be manifested in her children, because these attributes will increase their survival rate.

The mother also provides the same kind of information to a male offspring.

This information is not only passed on to daughters; it is also passed on to boys.

The father in each of the examples just given also contributes his share.

It is not the case that only the mother plays a role in the process of prenatal influence; the father also contributes his half.

After several generations, certain characteristics appear to be natural to males or to females, and these characteristics become pronounced, changing to some degree according to the civilization and the world in which they find themselves. Because they are passed on to children through the parents -- the parents, in the era in which they lived, believed that developing certain male or female characteristics in that era would be beneficial to survival in that world, and this behavioral pattern is passed on to the child like a gene. When the child is first born it is not yet obvious, but as he grows up, he will live according to this specific behavioral pattern that his parents passed on to him.

The example I am about to give is not entirely appropriate, but I cannot speak on their behalf -- for example, women living in Islamic countries: from the moment of birth, a little girl already has the behavioral patterns specific to Islamic girls. She will necessarily not be anti-traditional or adopt a completely Western, open mode of survival. She will not seek to expose her body, will not seek to develop free love, and may even resist arranged marriages, including the fact that a man may marry four wives in his lifetime, and so on. Whether you say she is resigned to her fate or under social pressure, she necessarily has a self-perception. How did she form this self-perception? It was through this very method -- in the world, the civilization, and the society in which her parents lived, it was written into the child's behavioral pattern through something akin to genetic inheritance.

Of course, they can indeed change within this generation; it is not that once it is written it cannot be changed. Many women from Islamic countries go abroad to study, and once they arrive in Western civilized society, they completely change. Because each person's experience alters their original information, and this also provides important leeway, giving you room to develop -- it is not that the program is written in stone.

Questioning Innate Patterns

The child also only uses this kind of information as a guide, as a premise for establishing early behavior patterns. As the child's mind develops, the child immediately begins to question whether those early assumptions are reasonable.

This questioning of basic premises is one of the greatest differences between you and the animal world. What do animals do? They do not question. Whatever survival patterns animal parents teach their offspring, those patterns simply continue on. But humans are not like that. Humans begin to question: Is the behavior pattern I have had since childhood reasonable and correct? This is the key point.

Seth emphasizes once again:

In your terms, the psyche then contains these male and female characteristics, and these have great latitude. It contains bisexuality, placed together in many different proportions within the human personality.

Within each person's personality, the proportion of male and female is not fixed; it is not half and half. You must not learn this in a pedantic way -- the moment someone says a person's psyche contains male and female, you immediately think it should be 50% to 50%. That is not how it is. How could you be so dogmatic and rigid? Every person has both male and female traits, but it is not half and half. This person might be 48% male and 52% female; that person might be 73% male and only 27% female. It is not fixed; everyone is different.

The Nature of Love

Seth then said something very important. Everyone, underline it:

Love is the force from which being emerges.

Simply put, love is the very force by which we exist. Whether we are talking about us as people or as a species, the force from which we exist in this world is love. In other words, without love there would be no existence for us. You can put it that bluntly.

Love seeks expression and creativity.

Love wants to express and create. Love cannot just do nothing; that would not be love.

Sexual expression is one way that love seeks creativity.

But it is not the only way. Love can be expressed through art, religion, play, or other actions that benefit others. It cannot be limited to sex alone.

There is also no rule about what proportion a normal adult should use sex to express himself. Every person is completely different. You cannot make a definitive judgment about it. Just as before, you cannot divide male and female into 55 percent. People who study spirituality must avoid falling into this so-called trap of scientific logic, always wanting to standardize and pattern everything.

The Issue of Homosexuality

Seth then goes on to discuss the issue of homosexuality:

Say that many of these men who are labeled homosexual by themselves and by others, he wants to be a father.

You will find that many homosexual men also want children, and many homosexual women also want children. They will arrange for one person to become pregnant through artificial insemination or surrogacy, and they also want to be fathers and mothers. Homosexuals, one would think, having chosen homosexuality, have already chosen a life without children. Not so, they still want to be fathers.

Their beliefs and the beliefs of your society make them imagine that they must always be heterosexual, or assimilated heterosexuals.

What does this mean? Although homosexuals do not have children, because they live within the value system of this larger society of ours, they still have an imagination, a sense that they themselves have always been heterosexual -- the desire to have children is one manifestation of this.

Many people feel a desire for women.

Some male homosexuals do have desire for women, and we now call such people bisexual. Actually, Seth pointed this out long ago -- that is also a kind of repressed desire. Many male homosexuals say they cannot like women, but inwardly they still have a longing for women.

Your male or female tendencies limit you in ways you do not understand.

For example, in many instances:

A gentle homosexual father has a better innate concept of masculinity than a heterosexual male does.

A gentle homosexual father has a better understanding, an innate understanding, of the concept of masculinity than a heterosexual man does. Because a heterosexual man believes that men must be cruel, must be insensitive, must be competitive. But both of these are stereotyped images -- this so-called stereotyped impression of the father, both are stereotyped.

Love Expressed Through Art

Seth says:

Love can quite legitimately be expressed through art.

But this does not mean that such a person arbitrarily, in any given case, suppressed sexuality and channeled sexual energy into creative products — of course that is possible, but it is not necessary. In any field of art, many natural artists are normal — remember, they must be normal — expressing love through this kind of creative effort more than through sexual behavior.

This does not mean that such people never had pleasurable or even lasting sexual relationships, but that by and large their loving motivation is expressed through artistic products.

Artists express love through art, and through art, love seeks a non-physical statement — through art, artists tell people that love can transcend the physical.

A great artist engaged in any kind of art at any time intuitively feels a private personhood that transcends a specific gender.

Every artist has a completely unique private personhood, which is his individuality. This individuality transcends gender. Many artists are quite unsociable, or have very eccentric personalities — we call it having a strong personality, and generally the greater the artist, the stronger the individuality — and this individuality has already completely transcended the characteristics of his gender.

As long as you identify your being with your gender, you limit the potential of the individual and of the human race.

As long as you regard your gender as identical to your human or spiritual aspects, it will limit your human potential.

The Bisexual Nature and Non-Sexual Intimate Relationships

Each person usually finds it easier to operate as a homosexual male or a homosexual female. But each person is fundamentally bisexual.

Bisexuality implies the qualities of both parents.

What is meant by bisexuality is that this person is both father and mother, implying the qualities of both parents.

Seth emphasizes once again here:

In this state, sexual healing is a natural part of the expression of love, but it is not the limit of the expression of love.

Sex is a part of the expression of love, but it is not the limit of the expression of love, nor is it the whole of the expression of love -- it is only one part of how love expresses itself in nature.

Because of the implications attached to male homosexuality and female homosexuality, many very good non-sexual relationships are denied.

There are some relationships that cross gender lines, and because of society's implications about homosexuality, these are denied. What does this mean? If two girls are especially close to each other, eating together, living together, sleeping together, they are not actually lesbians, but because of society's implications, it is as if they are being hinted at as being lesbians. In fact, these two are not in love at all; they are just very, very good little sisters, best friends. Men have the same problem -- leaving the wife at home without accompanying her, going out every day to play mahjong and drink, night after night, month after month, year after year, he is far closer to his buddies than to his wife. These are all non-sexual relationships, but very intimate ones. Yet this kind of relationship is not accepted by mainstream society -- either you are homosexual, that can be understood; or if two people of the same sex are always clinging to each other, what are they doing? You hold my hand, I hold yours, two men. If you say two men go out together every day to hang out at bars, to go clubbing together, can you believe that they are just good buddies? So here we have a misunderstanding in human society, denying the existence of this kind of non-sexual intimate relationship.

Then those whom they themselves and society label as not heterosexual are also excluded from many heterosexual relationships.

All those who are not heterosexual are excluded. And those who are labeled this way are often driven only by confusion, expressing their love only through sexual behavior -- they themselves are confused, very lost, not knowing what to do, mistakenly believing that expressing love through sex is the only way.

They feel forced to imitate what they think of as the natural male and female roles.

Homosexuals have already transcended gender behavior, yet in practice they imitate the practices of heterosexuals. So among homosexuals there will be some men wearing women's clothes, or women wearing very manly clothes. Among lesbians, there is always one who presents as more masculine and another as more feminine. Both are women, but because their psychological perceptions differ, it turns out this way -- not all of them are like this. The same goes for men; some couples are both of the more feminine style of dress, and it is also possible that one is more masculine and the other more feminine. What are you doing here? You are imitating heterosexuals! You are clearly homosexual, so just be openly homosexual, why go around in a circle and come back to imitate the heterosexuals whom you do not like at all, or do not even approve of, or even reject? Just be proper about it; however you two want to love each other is your own business, it is a matter between the two of you, two men or two women, and you do not need to consider society's feelings at all. But no, they feel forced to imitate what they think of as the natural male and female roles.

And sometimes the result is just the opposite, becoming a ridiculous and inferior caricature. A man insists on imitating a woman's behavior, a woman insists on imitating a man's behavior; this deliberate, intentional imitation is extremely ridiculous and inferior. And this inferior imitation enrages the people being imitated -- that is, the normal heterosexuals. Because when these homosexuals imitate heterosexuals, in order to imitate they must exaggerate and amplify. In male homosexual couples, the one playing the female role is often more feminine than women -- that mannerism, the orchid fingers, many people cannot stand it. The reverse is also true; many girls playing the male role in lesbian relationships are more masculine than men, and in sexual relations the degree of roughness, the crude behavior, even behavior that injures the partner, is even more excessive than that of men. This state is men pretending to be women being more womanly than women, women pretending to be men being more manly than men.

They are in fact mercilessly exposing the exaggerated version of how we heterosexuals emphasize the differences between male and female genders in human relationships. In heterosexuality we think these things are very natural and normal: women should be soft, charming, and beautiful; men should be tall, strong, and robust. In fact, these things themselves are already abnormal -- because people are inherently bisexual, you do not need to deliberately highlight and emphasize one particular gender. Yet in our society we insist on highlighting and emphasizing it; we find it natural and comfortable, and we do not feel there is anything wrong with it. But when homosexuals imitate us, we cannot stand it; we feel sick just looking at it. In fact, we do those very things that we find sickening every single day. On a woman, her behavior and mannerisms are tolerable and acceptable to you; but when a man imitates her, you cannot accept it. Is it the male identity imitating the female that you cannot accept, or is it this manner of behavior itself that you cannot accept? Deep down, you cannot accept this manner of behavior, but because of your approval of heterosexuality, you can only accept this manner of behavior, and you use belief to tell yourself that it is normal and reasonable. And when a man imitates a woman, this exaggerated performance and exaggerated manifestation becomes unbearable to you.

Gender Patterns in History and Population Regulation

Seth then talks about gender patterns in history:

Now, there have been periods in history when, practically speaking, it was appropriate for a man to have many wives.

In some periods polygamy was practiced, including in Islam, where polygamy still exists today², and in ancient China there was the wife-and-concubine system³ -- one wife, but many concubines allowed. The reason for this was that men died in war, and his seed could be planted in many wombs. This was especially necessary when disease often struck down men and women prematurely. In certain historical periods, epidemics or diseases were rampant, and human lifespans were very short -- there was a period when the average human lifespan was only a little over 30 years⁴. At such times, humanity needed to reproduce in large numbers in order for the species to continue. When material conditions were harsh, this kind of social tradition would often emerge. It was the same in ancient China: landlords could marry many, many wives, while many peasants could never marry a wife in their entire lives.

And when there was overpopulation, Seth says:

The so-called tendencies toward male homosexuality and female homosexuality will rise to the surface. But there are also other non-physical ways of expressing non-physical tendencies, such as the great question of god meeting god, and the emergence of challenges.

When there is overpopulation, two tendencies appear: one is that the issue of male and female homosexuality becomes very obvious and rises to the surface. This is not unique to humans -- if you have seen the simulated experiment on the ultimate society of mice that I explained before⁵, you would know: if you build an ultimate paradise for mice, with no worries about food or shelter, you would imagine the mice would reproduce rapidly, but you would find that is not the case. When the number of mice in a specific enclosed area reaches a certain level, a great deal of homosexual tendencies appear. Male mice gather together and spend all day grooming themselves to be extremely beautiful, their fur combed smooth and shiny, but they do not mate; female mice live alone in their burrows, not communicating with male mice, and not wanting to be courted. This happens in mice as well.

Human society is the same -- if it reaches the stage of overpopulation, homosexuality will naturally become prevalent, and it becomes a spontaneous means of regulating population numbers. Besides this kind of homosexuality to reduce population, there is another way: people will pursue spiritual and psychic pursuits in large numbers, and challenges regarding truth or other questions will emerge. People will pursue needs of a higher realm beyond biological needs, and biological needs will naturally decrease. If everyone became a monk or nun, who would still be having children? This alleviates the problem of population explosion.

So these things complement each other. In Chinese history there were also many movements to suppress Buddhism or suppress religion, and some of them occurred because the population at the time was too small. In agricultural and industrial societies, population was the wealth of society and the wealth of the nation, but if religion became too prevalent it would lead to a decrease in population, and it would also place enormous financial pressure on the state -- these monks did not work and needed to be supported; one monastery might need one village or several villages to support it. If there were very many monasteries, hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands across the country, the state's revenue could not bear it. Moreover, these people who became monks would discover that by becoming monks they did not have to labor and could study Buddhist scriptures every day, which would lead to large numbers of people becoming monks, causing a massive decrease in the male population.

So when it developed to an extreme, there were several movements to suppress Buddhism in ancient China⁶, all of which had such profound social backgrounds, and were not purely religious issues. Later, Chinese Buddhism was very clever: it discovered the root of the problem and did two things. First, they very formally, collectively, and uniformly declared to the imperial court of the time that they had no intention of competing with the court for any social status or social influence, and would always be willing to be one member of society rather than becoming the dominant force in society -- this is one of the biggest differences between Buddhism and Christianity: Christianity everywhere seeks to obtain ruling power, while Buddhism actively gave this up under China's imperial society. Second, they made an important decision, which was to begin laboring themselves -- as long as they were given a certain amount of land, they would grow their own grain and farm, obtaining their own income through farming, without needing support from others. The system of alms-support was very prevalent in early Indian Buddhism, including in present-day Theravada Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, but in later Han Chinese Buddhism the alms-support system disappeared, and it was entirely a self-sufficient way of life. This is what allowed Buddhism to continue in China for the following thousand years.

Beliefs About Sex: The Bible, Freud, and Children

Seth mentions:

Some lost portions of the Bible had to do with sex.

There are some portions of the Bible that were lost, deliberately left out. These had to do with sex, and they contained Christ's beliefs about sex. Those parts were considered blasphemous and were not passed down through history to you; they were deleted from the Bible. There was a correct understanding Christ had about sex in there, but it was not passed on to us.

Seth emphasizes again:

Expressing love through sexual acts is natural.

There is no need for any sense of shame. It is the most natural thing, and it is natural and good. But there is a distinction here: if love is expressed only through sexual acts, then that is unnatural. The distinction lies in that one word, "only."

Then he criticizes Freud:

Many of Freud's sexual concepts did not reflect man's natural situation.

Freud attributed all psychological activity, everything internal, to sexual problems. That was the tendency of his theory. And the complexes and neuroses he generalized and defined were products of your traditions and beliefs, not natural biological phenomena. In the behaviors you observed, you would naturally find some evidence for them.

Many of the traditions did indeed come from Greece, from the great Greek writers, who regarded as a characteristic of the psyche what was a Greek tradition.

The starting point of Western civilization is ancient Greece. Many Greek writers and philosophers regarded the traditional Greek viewpoint as a characteristic of spirituality, which is why ancient Greek material holds such a high position in the history of Western philosophy. And these things were presented in a beautiful but tragic way — the hallmark of Greek civilization is that it is very beautiful, yet permeated with sorrow everywhere. Just look at their myths: if it is not war, it is battle, or jealousy, or strife — all kinds of chaos over sex.

Seth continues:

The boy does not naturally try to wrestle his father to the ground.

This character might be a typo; it should be "oppose" — the boy does not naturally want to set himself against his own father.

He wants to excel over his father; he seeks to be himself completely.

The boy wants to surpass his father, to be himself. In his eyes, his father is completely himself, and he wants to become someone like his father. For his own sake and for his father's sake, he hopes to surpass his own abilities and his father's — the student surpassing the master.

When boys are still children, there was a time when he thought his father would never die. From a child's perspective, the father is the sky; whatever the father says is truth; the father never does anything wrong. He wants to prove this on his father's behalf — to prove that his father is excellent and remarkable. Since his father never does anything wrong, existing like a god, then he should not do anything wrong either; he wants to be like his father. Perhaps he tries to accomplish what his father seemingly could not, because he can never become his father; he will always be his father's son.

The male tries to justify the father.

This "bian bai" should be "justify" — he hopes his performance can win his father's approval. This is far more natural than wanting to destroy him or envy him in a negative way. Boys want their father's recognition and affirmation much more than they want to denigrate or destroy their father. But Freud would think otherwise — Freud's basic view holds that the son is competing with the father for the mother's love. Because from the male perspective, when the son grows up, he naturally competes with the father for the mother's love in a sexual sense. Freud's understanding of sex and love was far too narrow.

The child is simply a male child, and he does not, as is usually supposed, envy the father because of the mother.

This child is still a child himself; he is simply a male child. His psyche is not that focused on a male identity — a boy, when he is young, does not focus on a psychological male identity. Seth says he is not saying that children do not have an innate sexual nature; they simply do not focus on their maleness or femaleness in the way you assume.

To the boy, the penis belongs to him as a personal possession, like an arm or a leg, or like his mouth or his anus.

He does not treat it as a weapon — what does "treating it as a weapon" mean? It means that in terms of possessing the female, the male sexual organ is treated as a weapon. Freud believed that the boy wants to compete with his father for his mother, which would necessarily require using his penis as a weapon to possess his mother. Seth believes this is fundamentally impossible; Freud was wrong.

His love for his mother is not jealous in the way that is assumed.

He will think that his father does indeed divide his mother's love — the father does indeed take a share of the mother's love away from the child. But he does not, as is currently assumed, want to possess his mother sexually. He may be angry that his father occupies a large share of his mother's affection — boys and girls are both like this, because they are competing for love. But he does not want to possess his mother sexually; he does not yet understand what those terms mean. Sometimes he may be jealous because he cannot get his mother's attention, but it is not the kind of sexual jealousy generally assumed.

Your beliefs blind you to the nature of children's sexuality.

Children enjoy their bodies and do have sexual arousal, but the psychological implications are not those that adults assign to them. Children do have their own sexual arousal, and they do enjoy their bodies and explore their bodies, but this is not the same as the sexual understanding we adults have. These are all things adults assign to them, while children do not think that way. For them it is simply sexual exploration and sexual impulse.

On this topic, the most typical example is Hu Yinmeng — she once wrote a memoir specifically about her sexuality, discussing sex from a female perspective. She is a very spiritual woman who translated many books by Krishnamurti⁷ and wrote many of her own. In her autobiographical writing, she mentioned that from a young age she knew that touching herself there felt good. She knew it as soon as she was old enough to understand; no one needed to teach her or tell her anything, and she did not feel it was something shameful. Female masturbation is very natural; she understood it from childhood.

It is just that some parents instill ideas in their children from an early age, managing and controlling them, using all kinds of methods to force them not to do such things. So some children come to feel it is shameful, something they should not do. But for other children whose parents are more open-minded and do not impose too many restrictions, they will explore naturally. This kind of bodily exploration is very normal. What Seth points out here is that our understanding of children's sexual nature is very blind, and children do have sexual arousal — this is normal, so do not make a fuss. What is "precocious puberty"? Sex does not need to be precocious; sex is mature from the very beginning. It is only you who think it is precocious, which is why so many parents make a fuss.

The Social Nature of Father-Son Antagonism

Seth concludes by saying:

The belief in the innate antagonism between son and father, and the belief that the son must overthrow the father, merely honors culture and tradition, being interested in social patterns rather than natural ones.

Not natural patterns, but social attributes rather than natural attributes, not biological or physiological patterns. The idea that a son is born with this kind of antagonistic emotion toward his father -- Seth says this is not an innate, biological, or physiological pattern, but rather a learned cultural and traditional pattern acquired after the fact.

These concepts are nevertheless seized upon to explain behavior that is neither innate nor biologically related.

We often use such social concepts, cultural concepts, traditional concepts, economic and social concepts, to explain behavior that is neither innate nor biologically related.

The dictation for this session ends here. After giving Jane a page of personal material, the session ended at 1:18. This concludes the first part of the Chapter 5 interpretation, and I will share it with you up to here. Wishing everyone a magical day.

The Themes of the Ages and the Experiments of Consciousness

Seth begins by saying that, in a manner of speaking, humanity deals with different important themes in different ages, and each age has its own theme, with perhaps secondary themes interspersed throughout. But the nature of personality, religion, politics, the family, and art — all these things that are encountered in every age — all of these are referenced from the viewpoint of the main theme.

In a manner of speaking, humanity deals with different important themes in different ages. Perhaps there are secondary themes interspersed during this period. But the nature of personality, religion, politics, the family, and art — all these things that are encountered in every age — all of these are referenced from the viewpoint of the main theme.

What he means is that each age has its own theme, and in any period we will encounter these questions about the nature of humanity, religion, politics, the family, and art. These questions will all be referenced from the viewpoint of that age's theme. In other words, these viewpoints are all influenced by the attributes of the age at that time, and they all bear the stamp of the age, interpreted through the theme of that age.

So the usual historical account is that humanity takes its own unique consciousness and experiments with it. In actual life, in different historical ages, we must take various kinds of human consciousness and place them in specific historical periods to conduct experiments. What this means is that people need to experience different conscious experiences in different historical periods, and that is why people need to continually reincarnate, why people need these different historical backgrounds. You need to understand what this means: different historical periods have different historical themes, and the people living in that age need such a theme to temper their consciousness, or to experience the changes in their consciousness under such a theme.

And as I have mentioned many times, this must involve a separation between the object and the perceiver.

Session 772

As I have mentioned many times, there must be a separation between the object and the perceiver.

That is, between the material world, nature, and the observer -- that is, between nature and man, between what we consider the objective world and man's subjective observer -- there must be a division, a separation. This leads to a situation in which man begins to think of himself as separate from the rest of existence. He has said many times that in the process of experiencing different historical periods, man must separate that era from himself -- himself as the observer and experiencer. Man separates himself from nature, and only then can he observe and experience it from within. This is a normal state. But this then leads to his being separated from all other existence.

What he really wants to say is: is this separation necessarily required? When you recognize this existence that spans time and spans eras, there is actually no such necessity. But if we live within this historical period, we must understand that at that time we separated ourselves from the cognition of this era. You think the theme of this era is such and such, and then you experience it from this side, but you will also go to different eras to experience different themes.

The Male-Oriented Ego and the Female-Oriented Psyche

Seth goes on to say that the characteristics you think of as male-oriented in the ego, that is, the ego, what we usually call the small self, are all male-oriented; while our inner, psychic, spiritual aspects are all female-oriented.

The characteristics you think of as male-oriented in the ego, that is, the ego, are all male-oriented, while your spiritual, psychic aspects are all female-oriented. It is just that the species encourages those human characteristics and brings them to the forefront to be enforced.

Why is our human ego so obvious and so dominant? It is because, as a male orientation, it has received human encouragement. As was said earlier, humans consider masculine things to be logical, scientific, and cool-headed, so encouraging the male orientation leads to our ego becoming very strong. In other words, we basically praise and reward the ego; as for the non-ego parts, the spiritual parts, the intuitive parts, the impulsive parts, we consider these to be more feminine, emotional, irrational, and not meant to be mainstream.

Actually, for a long time you have used those as guiding principles to look at your world and to form your culture.

We have always used this masculine cultural angle as the main body for viewing the world and building culture. When humans deal with this world under the premise of the small self taking the lead, it is inevitably a masculinized society. And we use this masculinized society to dominate culture, social systems, and institutional structures. Remember, why have we become a patriarchal society today, a society dominated by men? It is because our ego has become dominant.

Of course there are some notable exceptions, but for the most part this is the case. Seth says the exceptions are not discussed here; he is talking about the mainstream. He says he is talking about the Western world historically, together with the traditions of Rome and ancient Greece.

Thus, your gods became male.

So now look at all the major gods in the world, whether Allah, God, Jesus, or the Buddha, they are all male, leaning male. You see humanity struggling against nature, and struggling against one another. You think the Greek tragedies are great because they so firmly became echoes of your beliefs. The culture and legends of ancient Greece were already discussed once before. Why is Greece tragic and great? Because the main thread of ancient Greek mythology is about the war between humans and gods⁸. The strength of humans and gods is not evenly matched, but humans, relying on their own fortitude, unwaveringly fight against the gods. This is the situation between humans and gods in ancient Greek tragedy.

Man was seen as being in direct opposition to his own father.

Because you treat gods as a kind of fatherly existence, male, after all. You have assigned male characteristics to the gods, so opposing the gods is opposing your own father. This causes family relationships to become a mirror of this belief as well.

And those beliefs were then taken as statements of fact about the human condition.

It is as if in family relationships, the relationship between son and father has never been good, and there is often rebellion and defiance, so people take this as a fact and say this is normal. Because the relationship between son and father is just not good. Add to that Freud's theory, which holds that sons are always competing with fathers for the mother based on this kind of sexual right. In this way, combined with ancient Greek mythology, it makes you feel that this is a fact. In fact, it is not at all. The premise is that you are using a male angle to view the world, which is what leads to this structure.

The Polarization of the Sexes and the Denial of Natural Origins

At the same time, you developed a very polarized concept of male and female regarding infants. In our concepts of male and female, it is either one or the other; a person must mark their gender attribute and declare their identity.

Those feminine characteristics were then considered secondary, because they represented the natural source from which mankind sought release.

What this sentence means is that humanity needs to obtain release and liberation from its own natural source. This source is the natural origin. We all come from nature, and this is perfectly normal, but people want desperately to deny this, to separate themselves from nature and set themselves in opposition to it, believing that humans have transcended nature. So they consider these characteristics secondary, because people do not want to admit that nature is their origin.

To a certain degree, this is a highly disguised, real, yet creative drama. It should be "the drama of the sexes." Because in its own way, human consciousness is playing a high-stakes game, and this drama must be believed.

To a certain degree, this is a highly disguised, real, yet creative drama. Because in its own way, human consciousness is playing a very high-stakes game, and this drama must be believed.

We begin to play a highly disguised and creative game: humans did not emerge from natural origins, separating themselves from the source and denying that they emerged from this source. This is certainly false, it is disguised, but it makes us believe it is real. In humanity's own way, it is playing a high-stakes game, making you have to believe that this drama is real -- that humans are not derived from the natural world, that humans stand above and outside nature, regarding themselves as observers of nature. Actually, if you think about it, such a perception has already cut oneself off from nature. If you believe you are a part of nature, as a part of nature, how can you observe this nature? You are a subset of it, a part of it, so how can you jump out and say, "I will observe this whole"? Unless you are not this part, unless you stand outside it, only then can you observe it.

Human consciousness has always been seeking growth. It wants to form a new branch from its own source. The source is nature, but it wants to form a new branch from within the source and create something new. This new thing must transcend the old thing, transcend nature, so it must pretend to dislike and deny that source. If I came from the natural world, and my origin is there, then what new tricks could I possibly play? So it must first pretend to deny, dislike, and deny that source, saying, "I did not come from there."

Seth gives an example: just as an adolescent may for a while seek independence and avoid their parents. Every adolescent goes through a period of desperately trying to escape the family, even running away from home and taking extreme measures. When it comes time for college, they hope to get as far away as possible, to escape their parents' clutches -- this is the same in China and abroad. I remember last year there was an Oscar-winning film, I think, that dealt with something similar. A single mother with a daughter; when the daughter grew up, she lived in California but insisted on going to college in New York, a six-hour flight away. Her mother could not stop her no matter what, so she went. Only after she got there did she realize that the feeling of leaving home was not as wonderful as she had imagined. This is a film about adolescent growth, and I remember it won an award at the time, because it was very true to life, depicting the separation from family that any child goes through in the process of going to college. The example Seth gives is the same: humanity wants to separate from its own source, just as an adolescent wants to separate from their parents, wanting to prove themselves and obtain something new.

Gender Fluidity Before Ancient Greece and Rome

Before the so-called cultural flowering of Greece and Rome, consciousness had not yet reached that kind of specialization. It was not as clearly divided as it is now; the differentiation of consciousness by male and female, by gender, was not yet that strong.

Before the so-called cultural flowering of Greece and Rome, consciousness had not yet reached that kind of specialization. Many gods and goddesses and other deities had male and female characteristics mixed together in their natures. There were gods who were half human and half beast.

Human beings at that time had not yet taken up the themes of Western culture. Before the civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, human consciousness was not yet divided and restricted by gender the way it is now, so the gods of that time included male gods and female gods, and also some gods who were neither male nor female, animal gods, and gods who were half human and half beast. This is very similar to ancient China. Look at the Classic of Mountains and Seas in ancient China: the gods there were also male gods and female gods. In the very beginning of Chinese mythology, Nuwa mended the sky; Nuwa and Fuxi are regarded in ancient Chinese mythology as the ancestors of culture⁹. They were brother and sister, but also male and female, a brother and sister who could become husband and wife¹⁰. By today's standards this would be an incestuous relationship, but in ancient mythology that is how things were. Moreover, the two of them were two snakes intertwined, with human bodies and faces, and the lower halves of their bodies were two snakes. This is the most primitive image of Nuwa and Fuxi. So in the earliest period of humanity, people did not distinguish gender as clearly as they do now, not like now when all the gods are masculinized. At that time male and female were often one body, or mixed together, and half-human, half-beast figures were more common. This example shows that the themes of modern Western civilization had not yet formed in that period: leaning masculine, leaning scientific, leaning rational, leaning male.

These changes first took place in the mythic stories of human beings. Humanity then began to separate itself from nature. The animals also began gradually to disappear. Humanity first changed its myths, and then changed this world that the gods had created, the world that reflected the gods.

He first changed the myths, and then changed the world the gods had created. He began to look at things from this single-gender perspective. Before that, there were various divisions of labor, but there was also much leeway in sexual expression. For example, children were a necessary part of the family, because a family was a pair of people of the same nature who cooperated in seeking food and shelter. In the civilizations before modern Western civilization, people had great leeway in terms of gender. Children were important members of the family, not like now when children are appendages of the family. The way we now dote on and spoil children is to treat the child as a child, rather than as an equal. The very words "doting" and "spoiling" show that the other person is not regarded as one's equal. But in the truly ancient period, children played a very important role in the family; they were relatively equal, they shared in the family's division of labor, they had their own work, and they were an important part of the family membership. The family had father and mother, brothers and sisters, children; these members joined together, formed teams and cooperated, seeking food and shelter. Such a family was the most stable unit in the entire primitive tribe.

Relationships such as what you call male homosexuality and female homosexuality also existed quite freely in that period, and they existed simultaneously.

"Simultaneously" means it was not that in one period male homosexuality was dominant and in another period female homosexuality was dominant; rather, male homosexuality, female homosexuality, and heterosexuality all existed at the same time in that era. Whether or not there was sexual expression based on male or female, these were all considered pertinent, that is, accepted, ordinary, and viewed equally. Not like now, when homosexuality is viewed with many strange looks.

And they formed powerful bonds like those between brothers and sisters.

Male homosexuals were like a pair of brothers, and female homosexuals were like a pair of sisters; these were very powerful bonds.

Interpreting the Animal Kingdom Through Human Sexual Beliefs

When you observe the animal kingdom, you also study male and female behavior through your own specialized sexual beliefs.

When you look at the animal kingdom, you also study the behavior of males and females through a specialized set of sexual beliefs of your own. You look for aggression, territorial jealousy, passivity, maternal instinct, or whatever patterns. These viewpoints are all human patterns.

Humans impose their own viewpoints onto animals, anthropomorphizing them. The more anthropomorphized the animal world is, the more it resonates with people, and the more everyone wants to watch it. In the earliest Animal World programs, the ones narrated by Teacher Zhao Zhongxiang, if you look carefully, they used a great deal of anthropomorphic description -- lion mothers, lion fathers, and so on. These particular interests are interests unique to humans themselves; you ignore the larger dimensions of animals. Humans are so narrow-minded that you do not consider the differences between animals and humans at all. Animals have their own completely independent dimensions of activity. You forcibly explain animal behavior from a human sexual perspective.

To some degree, the so-called maternal instinct, in any species to which the term can be applied, belongs to both males and females.

Actually, this maternal quality exists in both males and females. We humans often treat the maternal quality as something unique to mothers, but you do not realize that the maternal quality displayed in fathers is no less than that in mothers, and the same is true in the animal kingdom. Yet we often assign the maternal quality to females.

Animals have close friendships with members of the same sex. Love and devotion are not the prerogative of any one sex or any one species.

Love and devotion do not belong only to one sex; they are not possessed only by females -- males have them too. What he means is that people should not use their own sexual perspective to examine or explain the behavior of the animal kingdom.

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

When we use our belief system to explain the behavior of nature, we can only see what we want to see. Things that transcend belief, things that fall outside the accepted range of the belief system, you turn a blind eye to. So you provide yourselves with a natural model and pattern that conforms to human beliefs, and we say that nature is like this -- so humanized and so narrow.

Releasing the Male and Female Within Each Individual

Love and devotion are largely regarded as feminine characteristics. Society, churches, and state organizations are regarded as masculine.

This is not a matter of treating men and women as equal, not a matter of different forms of expression, not trying to show equality, but rather that the male and female components within each person should be released into expression.

Soon, many of you may become indignant or tense, thinking that I naturally mean only sexual expression.

The moment I raise this issue, you will say, since the male and female characteristics in each person are to be released and expressed, humanity will immediately think this refers to release in terms of sex. So you become indignant and tense: how can one person have both male and female attributes at the same time, how can that be expressed sexually? Impossible. Seth says you have actually completely misunderstood; that is not what he means. Sexual expression is only one part of this expression. What he really means is the great human characteristics and abilities released within each individual, those parts that are often denied expression and assigned to the opposite sex without being given a chance to unfold.

I mean that sexual expression is only one part of this expression. I am speaking of the great human characteristics and abilities released within each individual, the part that is often denied expression, and they have been assigned to the opposite sex without being given a chance to unfold.

Simply put, every person has bisexual characteristics, and above these lies the radiance and brilliance of the whole of humanity. This part is not divided into male and female. But because of human narrowness and prejudice, a portion of human attributes, such as love and devotion, are classified as feminine. So as a male, you feel you cannot express your own love and devotion, because the moment you do, you will be seen as effeminate, fussy, sissy, sentimental. If you cry several times while watching a movie, that is how people will perceive you, so you do not dare express it. Seth's point is, what I want you to express are these parts, not that the moment we speak of allowing both sexes to unfold, you think of sexual expression. No. What he means more is to let you express those aspects—as a male, you should express the parts that humanity has labeled, but which are actually parts of human nature—all of them.

To give a simple example, if a girl thinks about problems or lives her life from a very calm, highly logical, rational perspective, we will consider this girl masculine, like a man. We may even attach a more significant label to her: female PhD. Female PhD is a derogatory term. In the Chinese context there is a joke that people come in three types: men, women, and female PhDs. Why are female PhDs singled out as a separate type? Because people feel a female PhD is neither a man nor a woman, but a very strange species. Why? Because a female PhD implies a very high academic level, which necessarily requires strong logical thinking and rational analytical ability; otherwise how could she complete a PhD, how could she finish a dissertation? So human society believes that whenever a woman possesses strong logic, rationality, or reasoning ability, such a woman has already acquired male gender characteristics and is no longer purely female. Seth's point is, since every person is androgynous, you should express the whole of your human nature, and this transcends gender. Do not let humanity's shallow gender labels affect you, do not be afraid to express your other part. That part is also a part of your human nature, a part of your natural humanity. Although humanity often denies it, there is no need to.

The Masculine Ego and the Split Between Intellect and Awareness

Within your present framework, because of the specialized framework of male and female, you have adopted a male orientation, implying that the ego is male while the psyche is female.

This is a very interesting point. Whenever we talk about things of the psyche, we imply that they are female. When writing articles or essays, the moment we mention the psyche, we use the feminine pronoun "she." But the outward orientation, the expression of the small self, the expression of the ego, we all classify as male. So you impose a great division upon yourselves. In its practical application, the intellect seems to be separated from awareness.

So you impose a great division upon yourselves. In its practical application, the intellect seems to be separated from awareness. And you set up a situation in which antagonism seems to apply where there is none to begin with.

The intellect is the capacity for logical reasoning, while awareness mainly refers to intuition and the capacity for perception. People have separated the capacity for rational reasoning from the capacity for intuitive feeling. There was no need for antagonism to begin with; these are all parts of you as a person. People are not born distinguishing which parts are the ego, which are the inner self, which are the psyche, which are the self; they are all unified. But humanity has divided this into a male and female distinction, assigning intuition or emotional qualities to the female, and logic and rationality to the male. Thus we believe that our ego is rational and logical, while the psyche is emotional and intuitive. Does not such a division forcibly set a person against himself? You also believe that intuition and logic are opposed to each other, splitting what is one whole into two parts, setting each person's inner self against itself.

When you think of a scientist, most of you think of a man.

The moment you think of a scientist, unless you add "female scientist," you are certainly thinking of a man. Why do we not say "male scientist"? Because we assume that a scientist is a man. A female scientist must be specified as a "female scientist," otherwise confusion arises. It is the same as when we say "nurse"; by default a nurse is female, so a male nurse must be specified as a "male nurse." The same goes for "nanny"; we would not say "female nanny," but if the nanny is male, we would certainly say "male nanny." Humanity's distinction between the sexes is deeply ingrained.

An intellectual, an objective thinker, this is the scientist. He tries not to be emotional, or to identify with the subject being examined.

He must hold a certain viewpoint: I am the observer, I am the experimenter, I am objective and detached. What is meant by objective and detached is that I am myself, and the object of the experiment is the object of the experiment; I and it are two separate things. This is the same principle as "not identifying with the person being experimented upon." But in fact, you and he are one. You are also a part of nature. Anything a scientist observes and studies is a part of nature, yet you yourself are clearly also a part of nature, and still you remove yourself from it, saying, "I am an observer, an experimenter; I and the natural part I am studying have nothing to do with each other; we are completely separate." We humans consider this to be a quality a scientist should possess. Therefore he must not be emotional, and even less may he use intuition to make judgments. No scientist may say, "I feel it will turn out this way" or "my intuition tells me it will turn out this way." If he does, then this person is not qualified to be a scientist. Human society thinks this way: scientists value evidence and facts; how can you use intuition to discuss a problem?

Even between science and religion, there seems to be such a division. For even organized religion has a perceptual basis.

Any organized religion is founded upon prior perception, upon inner sensing.

Male scientists are often ashamed to use their intuition.

You see, this scientist never dares to say outright, "This is my intuition," because that not only appears unscientific, it is also feminine. What a male scientist is happiest about is not merely how his science is doing, but that people first acknowledge his male identity. If he uses a great deal of intuitive expression, his first worry is not that it is unscientific; he worries that others will regard him as feminine. This describes the underlying psychology of all male scientists.

Being illogical is a scientific crime, not because it is an unscientific attribute, but because it is considered a feminine attribute.

So being illogical, the matter of having no logic, is a scientific crime; he puts it in quotation marks. From the scientist's point of view, anything illogical is a crime against science. This is not because being illogical falls into the category of the unscientific, but because being illogical is a feminine attribute. Seth points this out with piercing clarity.

Science as a Typical Example of Male Orientation, and Its Exceptions

Science has followed a male orientation and has become a typical example of a male orientation. Up to now it has emphasized gender rather than humanity.

Science is a typical example of a male-oriented approach, so it goes all out to reject the things of the psyche, the inner things of humanity. What does it emphasize now? Gender, that is, the male gender, male dignity, which cannot be questioned, cannot be challenged. Look at whether science has this kind of attitude, this kind of face. When you dare to challenge it, when you dare to raise any question, look at the face of science, just like a man whose dignity has been challenged, doing everything possible to attack. You can find time to try it. Go challenge anyone related to science, and you will see, that face is fully exposed. Seth's words here are very direct. Daring to challenge science is like challenging those madmen.

To some extent, these people in the scientific community have tried to merge the so-called feminine and masculine characteristics. When they do so, the seeming contradictions or hostilities disappear.

Some scientists have merged masculine and feminine characteristics. To whatever degree, they are less likely than their contemporaries to allow sexual roles to make them psychologically blind. They are not easily led into psychological and scientific blindness by the narrowness of sexual roles.

Therefore they can more easily combine reason and emotion, perception and intellect. And in doing so, they have invented theories that can reconcile previous contradictions.

They are no longer restricted by gender, and they make use of all the main abilities of human nature, not just logic and reason, but also awareness, perception, and emotion. You may ask, do you still need emotion in science? Of course.

They unify, expand, and create, rather than divide.

These scientists who are not restricted by gender are very important to the development of human science and civilization. They allow science to unify, expand, and create, rather than become more divided and oppositional.

Then he gives an example: Einstein was such a person. That is why he was able to propose the theory of relativity that we now know — the special theory of relativity and the general theory of relativity. Do not forget, he proposed the special theory of relativity in his twenties¹¹.

Although he was tainted by traditional sexual beliefs, he still felt the part of himself that was human in such a way that he gladly made use of characteristics considered feminine.

You see, he gladly made use of characteristics considered feminine, that is, intuition, awareness, and perception. When he was especially young, in his twenties, he rebelled against the male scientific habits and orientation. What are male scientific habits? That is, not doing experiments like other scientists, not being led by traditional scientific beliefs. Einstein was working as a minor clerk in a patent office in Switzerland at the time¹², and he had a lot of time. Every evening he would chat with a group of friends in his room, and what they talked about was not scientific things, but philosophical things¹³. He had a group of philosophical friends, and this kind of philosophical discussion gave Einstein a huge breakthrough in science. So in his twenties, in that year, he published the special theory of relativity, the earliest theory of relativity. Even now, that has completely changed the development of human science. You think Einstein was a scientist, but he actually very gladly made use of a part of the feminine. Philosophical things basically all explore the inner things of the human psyche.

This rebellion was psychological. Even though he maintained an acceptable male orientation in his sexual activity, he still refused to use this inorganic limitation to restrict his mind and soul.

In his outward behavior he maintained an acceptable male orientation. He also liked girls and had romantic feelings toward women, but he was certainly not a homosexual. But psychologically he did not use this male as the only sexual orientation to restrict his mind and soul. The whole world felt his great capacity for awareness and the fruits of his dedication. Einstein's scientific achievements are obvious to all.

To put it bluntly, Einstein psychologically transcended gender; there was no distinction between male and female. But in his outward image, when he was young, he still maintained a male sexual orientation that human society generally could accept. We must recognize that he was still tainted by traditional beliefs, which is why he had this way about him. But Seth says that in essence, psychologically, Einstein was neither male nor female, or both male and female.

Because of the situation of the world and the overall male orientation of science, the results of his work were in large part applied to manipulation and control.

The whole world is masculinized, with an overall male orientation, so Einstein's scientific achievements were again used for control and manipulation. Many of his scientific theories, some of them, for example, were used to build the atomic bomb. He produced some profound insights in atomic physics, including things about space-time and relative quantities, and many of these were used to make weapons or things related to weapons.

Reason/Intellect versus Intuition/Impulse

Generally speaking, reason and intellect are thus regarded as masculine characteristics, and as the framework of the civilized, scientific, and organized world.

Our society now considers reason and intellect to be masculine characteristics, and also the framework of human civilization, science, and the organized world, universally applicable. That is why today's human society is a masculine society; the root lies here.

Intuition and impulse are considered erratic, unreliable, feminine, and should be controlled.

We often look at things from this viewpoint. Any intuition and impulse are considered abnormal, erratic, and should be regulated. We often say, "Impulse is the devil."

The world exists because of spontaneity.

Actually, how does your human world exist? It exists spontaneously. This in itself is not rational, not logical. This world did not come about because of reason and logical deduction. The existence of the entire world, including the natural world and all worlds of other dimensions, was not produced by design or logical computation, but arose spontaneously. You deny the very basis of the world's existence, insisting that it should be rational and intellectual. Are you not going in the opposite direction, heading south while driving north, climbing a tree to look for fish?

Civilization began because of people's impulse to be together. It grew spontaneously and entered into an order.

The reason human civilization developed is precisely because of people's impulse to be together. This impulse began civilization; it grew naturally and spontaneously, entering into an order. It was not rationally deduced, not the result of weighing pros and cons and analyzing; it was simply people's impulse to be together. Yet we deny it. We deny the importance of impulse, the importance of spontaneity, the importance of intuition. Our society now only acknowledges reason and intellect, while suppressing all intuition and impulse that are contrary to them.

You only see the exterior of many processes. Because your objectified viewpoint does not allow you to identify with the display of more content.

We lean toward objectification and only look at the exterior. We say about something, "Show me, let me see it displayed," regardless of the essential nature of the matter, only looking at the exterior. Then the result of only looking at the exterior inevitably leads to the inner content not being displayed, because you do not want to see it. You think that objective means only what the exterior lets you see counts as objective.

It seems to you that all systems break down at some point, and become disordered and flow into chaos.

Because you too much want to use order and reason to understand this society, when you see that some things in the world do not play by reason or logic at all, you fall into collapse. It enters into a chaos without any order, where your reason and logic are of no use, and you collapse.

The Narrowness of Sexual Identity and the Marginalization of the Elderly and Children

You apply these beliefs to physical systems and psychological systems. In terms of sex, you insist on a picture, you insist on a state of being either not male or not female, showing a person growing into a sexual identity, and then showing a clear focus.

You are either male or female. You think that from birth to adulthood, a person must grow into a boy or a girl, an adult male or an adult female, and this is the clear focus you think he should reach. If he does not grow into that, you think things have gone haywire, that something has gone wrong.

Yet in old age there is a departure from clear sexual identification.

When a person gets old, he departs from a very clear sexual identity. Once an elderly person reaches his eighties or nineties, he basically has little sense of identification with his own gender. He no longer simply sees himself as a man or a woman, but sees himself as an old person. He departs from clear sexual identification, and it becomes blurred, falling into a kind of sexual confusion. Elderly people do not have much awareness of gender. Seth says, you do not realize that the original premise and focus, the identification of the entity with sexual nature, is unnatural.

You do not realize that the original premise and focus, the identification of the entity with sexual nature, is unnatural. You have formed an entire framework, and from it you have formed your judgments.

When an old person departs from clear sexual identification and enters this state of not placing much importance on sex, you do not realize that this is normal. And that so-called premise of yours, the clear focus, the entity, the nature, those identifications are what is unnatural. When an elderly person departs from sexual awareness, that is what is normal. But you have formed an entire framework centered on male and female, and if an old person is neither male nor female, or does not have a clear identification with his own gender, he is pushed outside the system.

In many instances, a person in his childhood, that is, before sexual development, or in old age, after sexual awareness becomes confused, is often allowed greater personal freedom, and the sexual roles are more elastic and more truly in keeping with their entity.

Their entity is bisexual or asexual. From a spiritual perspective it is asexual; from a human perspective it is bisexual. So this accords with the human being's own entity, which has no strong awareness of gender.

Any deep discussion of the self will lead you into areas that overturn your traditional beliefs about sex. You will discover an entity, a psychological or psychic entity. This entity, in your terms, is both male and female. In it, the abilities of each sex are enhanced, liberated, and expressed.

When you truly explore the nature of humanity, you will overturn traditional perceptions of sex. You will discover that your psychic entity is both male and female. The male abilities (rationality, logical reasoning) and the female abilities (intuition, impulse) are all enhanced, released, and expressed. All your abilities are strengthened, not only the abilities of your present physical sex, but also those abilities of the opposite sex that you normally have not tapped into. A male in this process becomes more sensitive, more intuitive, more emotionally abundant, gentler, more loving, more devoted; a female becomes more rational, more capable of logical thinking, combining intuition with reason to achieve better results.

They may not have been released in this way in ordinary life, because in daily life they are still restricted by gender. Even someone like Einstein was subject to certain gender restrictions, and ordinary people are the same. But on the level of your psyche, you discover a greater dimension of your own reality: that you are a trans-gendered being, or a being beyond gender.

At least in the dream state, you meet those selves that transcend single-sex orientation.

In dreams, your awareness of gender is not that strong. Although in dreams you also have a gender, the same as now, your awareness of gender is not that strong. You will find that you rarely dream about things directly related to sexual life. Occasional erotic dreams happen, but the proportion is small. This tells you that in dreams your awareness of gender is not as strong as in waking life.

The Psyche's Encounter and the Necessity of Resolving Gender Opposites

This kind of encounter with the psyche is often met by great artists, writers, and great mystics.

When you explore the inner self, this way of exploration is often met by artists, writers, and mystics. They can feel it.

If you wish one day to transcend this world you are involved in, to overcome that seemingly hostile framework, this understanding is necessary.

When you want to resolve the conflicts, hostilities, and irreconcilable contradictions in the world, to look at social issues from a higher level, you must begin with your own psyche, deeply understand the underlying framework, and recognize the limitations and shortcomings of humanity's gender orientation. Only then can you truly change and resolve these essential conflicts of society.

The Basic Distinctions of Consciousness and the War Between the Sexes

So an over-specific sexual orientation instead reflects a basic distinction in consciousness. It not only separates a man from his own intuition and feelings to some degree, or a woman from her intellectual rationality to some degree, but also effectively provides a civilization in which the mind and the heart appear to be separate, and facts and revelation are isolated from each other.

Our over-specific sexual orientation reflects a basic distinction in consciousness. It separates a man from intuition and feeling, or separates a woman from rationality, and this distinction also provides for the existence of a civilization. In it, the mind and the heart appear to be separate, and facts are isolated from revelation. Revelation refers to those intuitive things.

To some degree, everyone is at war with their own psyche.

Because within you, there is often a war between rationality and intuition, between impulse and logic. All of a person's characteristics must be denied unless they conform to those characteristics considered normal for sexual identity.

All characteristics must be denied unless they conform to those characteristics considered normal for sexual identity.

So to this degree, all of a person's characteristics must first be denied, unless those characteristics conform to their current sense of gender identity. If these characteristics do not match the current gender perception, they deny them. That is why there is the saying "a real man does not easily shed tears." Even if you want to cry, you cannot cry; that is one such characteristic.

Under such development, only the characteristics that match your gender are allowed to be expressed, and characteristics that do not match your gender perception cannot be expressed. So in daily life, you become a satirical parody of sexuality. You are deliberately imitating masculinity or deliberately imitating femininity, and this is not your true nature.

In daily life, you become a satirical parody of sexuality.

If you face yourself honestly and bravely, you will find that many behaviors in daily life are deliberate reinforcements of your gender. You feel that you are deliberately playing the role of a woman or a man. In real life, we do our utmost to imitate, and we have never thought about living out our own true nature; instead, we do our utmost to imitate in terms of gender. There are too many examples: women wear high heels, put on makeup, and exaggerate their expressions, doing their utmost to display feminine characteristics; men feel they must go to the gym, have six-pack abs, be tall, cool and handsome, cold and unfeeling, showing masculine characteristics. Look at how many male actors perform nowadays; the young pretty-boys cannot act either, but in order to display masculinity, they keep a cold face all day, and having no expression is considered stylish. Many young girls adore this, thinking it is so handsome, so cool, so stylish. Having no expression is considered stylish, because coldness represents masculine characteristics.

Shallow Gender Variants

Seth puts it very clearly: you humans do not understand the true female and the true male. You have been forced into a shallow variant.

You humans do not understand the true female and the true male. You have been forced into a shallow variant.

In Seth's words, he can be quite sharp-tongued. The human society you see now, including every one of you here, is deliberately imitating a male and a female. This is a shallow variant -- not the true male and female, but a male and female expressed through ironic exaggeration. They have already lost the most important radiant part of human nature behind it. Like a clown, like someone in a stage play -- the man puts on a big beard, the woman paints her face bright red, takes mincing little steps, makes orchid-finger gestures. We are performing the same way on the stage of this life drama. This statement is very incisive. Once you recognize this, and then go observe your own behavior or other people's, you will see a great deal of performative traces and affectation.

The result is that the sexual schism colors all of your activities, but most of all, it limits the fulfillment of your psyche.

This sexual split -- either male or female -- colors all of your activities, but most seriously, it limits the fulfillment of your psyche. When you want to express one part of human nature, you find that this expression is supposed to belong to the opposite sex. When a man wants to show love, he finds it is not right; when he wants to cry, he says no, emotions cannot be shown casually. When a woman wants to show calm rationality, she says that is not right, that is not what a woman should do, a woman should be emotional.

Gender Identity's Harm to the Elderly and the Young

Since you measure sexual expression in the most limited way, and largely use it as a focal point of identity, then both your elderly and your young suffer the ill effects not of age, but of prejudice.

Because of your limited view of sexuality, you do not value the elderly and children when you look at them. This is not merely prejudice about age, saying children do not understand and the elderly are senile. More than that, it is prejudice about their lack of gender expression. They do not display strong sexual characteristics, do not have strong sexual recognition, and are more like sexless beings. And since our society uses sexual orientation as the primary measuring standard, these two groups of people with ambiguous gender—the elderly and children—are pushed to the margins of mainstream society. When we speak of mainstream society, we rarely take these two groups into account.

Interestingly, both the elderly and the young find themselves outside your organizational structures. Before adolescents take on sexual roles, their thinking is often very free, unrestrained, open, and innovative. The thinking of the elderly is also relatively free, but somewhat less so than that of children, because the elderly have, after all, gone through the process of gender and only in the end have it fade. Children, before recognizing sexual roles, do not have this sexual awareness.

I am not saying that the old and the young do not have sexual expression, but that neither group identifies its identity with sexual roles.

They do not identify their own identity with sexual roles—male or female—but rather recognize themselves first and foremost as human beings, and only secondarily as male or female.

If this man or this woman, the identity he or she has been given is this traveling identity of sexuality, and if that journey must stop at a certain age, then the sense of identity may also begin to dissolve.

If you believe that sexual expression is the only expression of humanity in society, then you will tell a person that when you grow old and no longer have this sexual expression, your humanity begins to dissolve and your sense of identity begins to dissolve. Because it makes you tie your sense of identity closely to gender. So when an elderly person is marginalized by society, or when their self-identity dissolves and they become confused about their self-identity, it is not only because they are old, but also because their gender identity has collapsed.

If children could sense that this identity was dependent upon this journey, then they would begin as soon as possible to fulfill their gender identity, squeezing themselves into sexual clothes, and society would suffer for it, because the great creative motives of intellect and intuition during growth would be separated at puberty, precisely when they need this power.

When a child discovers that human society values gender identity more than human identity, and discovers that if they do not become an adult woman or adult man, people simply do not care about them or value them, then they will desperately squeeze themselves into the roles of male and female, squeezing in early. So you see many boys and girls have this tendency, dressing themselves up early to look more like girls or boys. Some even more extremely attempt sexual behavior early, to reinforce the gender awareness of their identity. This is a major harm to humanity. Not because these children fall in love early, nor because they engage in sexual activity too early—those are superficial understandings. The greatest harm is this: these adolescents are the most creative and most capable group of people, the ones most able to change human society, because at this time their creativity is strongest and not limited by gender. Yet at this time they begin early to identify with their gender, and once they identify, their creative ability is greatly reduced. Because they inevitably abandon half of the abilities within their humanity that should have been developed and would have helped their creativity, identifying those abilities as belonging to the other gender, and feeling ashamed to actually use them. In this way humanity loses a great deal of creativity. If this continues, human creativity will gradually dry up. When adolescents most need creativity, they are instead limited by gender—that is the problem.

If you observe carefully, those true geniuses and outstanding people showed themselves at a very young age. Many excellent physicists and mathematicians—Gauss, for example, and many physicists who published papers that later won Nobel Prizes—published them in their twenties. Bohr also became world-famous in his twenties¹⁴. If he became famous in his twenties, he must have developed greatly during his adolescent years. So you can see how great this harm is.

Transcending Gender Identity in Orgasm

Ideally, adult men and women would find pleasure in sexual expression and find an overall orientation, but would also be immersed in a greater psychological identity and identity of the psyche, an identity that experiences and expresses all the great human capacities of the mind and psyche, bridging any artificial divisions.

You may read this passage and not know what he is trying to say. To put it in terms we can understand, an adult man and woman will feel pleasure in their respective sexual expression. Falling in love is one form of it, and the most extreme sexual expression is making love. When they make love, they feel intense pleasure. Then, in that intense pleasure for men and women, that is, in male and female orgasm, you find an overall orientation. What overall orientation? During orgasm, both men and women enter a state of open stillness similar to what you reach through seated meditation. At that instant, the brain, perhaps for a little longer in women and a little less time in men, regardless of how long it lasts, is in a state of open stillness that transcends gender. This is no longer a matter of clinging to identification with a gender identity during lovemaking, with the man thrusting for all he is worth and the woman straining to feel it; by then, they have completely transcended gender. In the state of male or female orgasm, once a person enters that open stillness, it becomes an overall orientation: both male and female, neither male nor female, transcending gender.

So people often joke that after men finish, after orgasm, they all become Buddhas or bodhisattvas. One minute they are like lechers, and the next they have become Buddhas. Why? Because after reaching orgasm, they have transcended gender and their understanding of sexuality. At this point, they also become immersed in a greater psychological identity and identity of the psyche, transcending their existing gender identity. At this moment, a man transcends his male identity and his male psychology, entering a greater state of open stillness. The same is true for a woman: at that moment, she can no longer feel her existence as a woman, but feels more like a divine presence. This experience of identity expresses all the great human capacities of the mind and psyche. At this point, the greatness of the human mind comes out in full, as do all the capacities of the psyche. In that state, every man and woman exists like a god, without desires or demands, content and joyful, their hearts filled with fulfillment and happiness beyond words. That happiness and fulfillment do not come from acquiring wealth or material things, but from something spiritual. This is the greatness of the human mind; this is how it should be.

Such a state can bridge this artificial separation between men and women. Male and female are an artificial division made by humanity, because each person is inherently both male and female. For the first time, he says that when men and women reach orgasm while making love, you are actually being given a state like this, allowing you to feel an existence that transcends gender, to truly feel that the sublime part of your humanity has no gender. He lets you experience how, for that one instant, you can transcend gender and approach the state of a god.

Seth's dictation ends here in this session. After giving Jane a page of personal material, he ended the session at 12:12.

To you, intellect and feeling seem like two opposing parts. You attach the male label to intellect and the female label to feeling, trying to divide mental and emotional characteristics between the sexes, forcing a pattern of stereotyped behavior into being, like the caricatured, imitative, stereotyped behavior mentioned in the previous session, exaggerating the characteristics of gender.

Again, men who are intuitive or have a certain artistic talent often consider themselves homosexual, whether they are or not.

This is quite normal. In everyday life, the men we see working in the arts all seem, to our eyes, to have some degree of homosexual inclination. There was a well-known makeup artist and image stylist from quite a while ago, a makeup artist and image stylist called Jimi¹⁵, who was a fairly typical example; and now, for example, among fashion designers, in fashion circles, whether Zhao Zhi, Armani, or other somewhat bigger-name, better-known designers, it seems that unless you say you are homosexual, you would be embarrassed to be part of that circle¹⁶. It seems that unless you say you are homosexual, you are not pure enough, as if you have no artistic talent; only by presenting yourself as homosexual can you proclaim that you have a great deal of talent in design. It is the same in other fields. Look at how they dress and style themselves, though things may be a little better now: rock musicians in the past looked rather dour, but look at their shoulder-length hair; from a certain perspective, weren't they imitating some feminine characteristics? Many of the things they did were very similar. I will not give too many examples like this. Seth has already explained the root of it: they are not doing this deliberately; they are not being natural, and they have become this way because they have been swept along by this division of gender made by humanity as a whole.

Session 773

Women whose interests exceed what are considered feminine interests are also often in the same situation.

For certain women, when her interests go beyond those of ordinary women, and she begins to lean toward things of logic, reasoning, and rationality, we then consider this woman to be leaning masculine. For example, if a lady works in science or research, she is considered to be leaning masculine; if she works in something related to the military, then she seems even more like a man.

Because intellect and emotion are considered so separately, attempts to express intuitive abilities often become irrational behavior.

Because we set intuition and emotion in opposition to intellect and rationality, anything that expresses intuition is then considered irrational behavior. Because our human society is a male-patterned, male-model society, it holds that rationality and intellect are the primary framework. In certain circles and certain fields, he denies the ability of the intellect and instead emphasizes emotional, affective, or intuitive behavior; in other circles, he does exactly the opposite, completely denying the ability of the intellect, emphasizing emotion, feeling, intuition, and denying any rational and logical thinking. He goes to the other extreme. And then this becomes a very fashionable thing. There are many such things now, for example all kinds of meditation classes, all kinds of sitting-meditation classes, all kinds of spiritual cultivation classes, which do not speak of rationality at all, do not speak of logic, do not speak of these scientific things; he believes that spiritual cultivation must be based on feeling, emotion, and intuition.

Intellectual concerns thus became a suspect.

Any consideration from the intellect, as long as you consider it from the angle of the intellect, you become very suspect. Resorting to reason is considered an embarrassment. If on this level of spiritual cultivation, or on this side of pure intuition and pure feeling, you talk about reason, it is considered too shameful a thing.

Conversely, intellectual and intuitive behavior should of course be beautifully mixed together; the two should work in coordination. But we either lean to one side or the other.

In the same way, you will try to force love to manifest a purely, or either-or, sexual orientation.

Because we always want love to manifest such an either-or pure tendency: you are either male or female, so your psychological activity must match that, must match the male identity or the female identity. That is why such a distinction exists. A dear caress or kiss between people of the same sex is usually not considered appropriate, and this taboo includes most tactile contact related to the human body. Over time it becomes that any intimate behavior between people of the same sex, including a caress, a kiss, physical contact, all of these, as long as they are between people of the same sex, are not accepted. Think about it yourself, is this not the case in your life? And you are constantly reinforcing this feeling. Many girls say, I hate it most when girls touch me, when a woman touches me my whole body feels uneasy; men too, if some man has intimate physical contact with him, putting an arm around his shoulder, a hug, he will feel very unnatural, very strange. Actually some countries do this better, they do not pay such special attention to it, but in many countries it is unnatural, extremely unnatural.

Touch is considered basic and sexual, to the extent that even the most harmless touch by another person on any part of your body is considered a potential danger.

On the one hand, your sexual terminology in language is too specific; on the other hand, you feel that if any kind of intimate relationship is allowed to happen, it must naturally lead to sexual expression. Your beliefs make this possible sexual event seem like a factual experience. What he means is that any normal physical touch and contact, including some caresses and contact, including between people of the same sex, these are all normal expressions of love, yet in our human society they are considered wrong. Because this kind of touch and physical caressing will definitely lead to sexual behavior; and once it leads to sexual behavior, then sexual behavior between two people of the same sex is basically unacceptable. In many places there is this problem between opposite sexes and same sexes alike, and between opposite sexes it goes without saying, if you touch someone of the opposite sex that is even more problematic.

This also forces you to guard your emotional life very carefully.

We are also very careful emotionally, why? Because you are especially afraid that any expression of love will be directed into a sexual relationship. If it is not an expression within a legitimate sexual relationship, legitimate meaning husband and wife, or boyfriend and girlfriend, then if it is not within this kind of sexual relationship, any intimate expression between opposite sexes must be suppressed. Because it tells you that apart from you and your boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse, any other intimate behavior will necessarily lead to sexual behavior. We humans think this way; this is human thinking.

In many instances, love itself seems wrong, because it necessarily implies sexual expression, when such expression is impossible or inconvenient at the time.

In many times, many instances, many scenarios, love itself is wrong, because it necessarily implies a sexual expression, and even if that expression is impossible or inappropriate at the time, it is still not allowed. For example, among children there are often expressions of love; elementary school students and even kindergarten children cannot possibly have any real sexual behavior or sexual contact, yet the love between them is also suppressed. We adults will say, pay attention, little boys and little girls must pay attention, they are educated from a young age, especially parents who have girls. Then what does this become? It becomes a distortion of love, distorted into that only love that can lead to a legitimate sexual relationship is accepted and recognized, and all love outside of that must be suppressed. So you see, how narrow and restrictive we humans have made the matter of love.

The Greater Latitude of Love

Some people have a great latitude for love, devotion, and loyalty, and will naturally seek expression in many different ways, or express it through strong and lasting friendships, through dedication to causes they believe in, or through enterprises that can help others. They may not be particularly sexually oriented, and this does not necessarily mean they are repressing their sexuality. To make them believe they must have frequent sexual intercourse when young, or to set up a standard of normalcy for their sexual experience, is pathological and ridiculous.

What does he mean by this passage? Some people have a great latitude and capacity for emotions such as love, devotion, and loyalty. These three things can be attributed to romantic love between men and women -- love, devotion, and loyalty, when placed in romantic love, have no problem at all -- but he says that for some people, besides having this sex-based emotion toward the opposite or same sex, love, devotion, and loyalty can also be displayed in many other areas, and those expressions are all natural, non-sexual, and unrelated to sex.

For example, strong and lasting friendships. Some people have friendships that last for decades, and they may even be friendships between the opposite sexes. Many people ask, can there really be pure friendship between men and women? Many people tell you no. The current social view tells you no, saying that all pure friendships between men and women are nonsense. And this view has become the mainstream understanding of society. No matter how much you emphasize and defend it, others will say you have ulterior motives. Here he denies the existence of friendship. He only acknowledges that friendship exists between people of the same sex, and that there is no friendship between the opposite sexes. Now even same-sex friendships are being questioned, because homosexuality is now quite common, and people suspect whether your same-sex friendship also carries a sexual orientation. So the entire human society is skeptical about friendship, looking at friendship with suspicious eyes. When you tell some people that the two of you share a pure friendship, many people are skeptical and chuckle. So when we were young, there was a song called "Auld Lang Syne" that was very moving and widely circulated, but young people today seem not to hear that kind of song anymore¹⁷, not to hear that kind of expression that touches people's hearts.

There are also some people who give their love, loyalty, and devotion to the causes they believe in. Many people devote themselves to various causes, not hesitating to sacrifice their lives, throwing away their heads and spilling their blood, giving their lives without regret -- that is far greater than devotion to romantic love. Would you say their love, loyalty, and devotion are all fake? Certainly not.

There is another kind, which is helping other people through enterprises and practical activities, through charities and foundations to help others, and they devote their entire life's energy to it. There are many such people, everywhere. The more famous ones we know now, like Mother Teresa, are very well known. People like Mother Teresa are everywhere. Here he tells you that they do not have any particular sexual orientation -- you would not say Mother Teresa has any particular orientation toward women or anything -- and they are not trying to repress their sexuality. Would you say these people are all repressing themselves? Because they cannot be satisfied or express themselves sexually, so they pour their emotions into other areas? Not at all. Be sure to remember, Seth emphasizes here that it is not that they are repressing their sexuality. Remember this. And to make them believe -- if you want to tell them that you should maintain very frequent sexual activity or sexual relations when you are young, or several times a week, as a standard of normalcy -- he says that is perverted and ridiculous. What he is pointing at is that the human view about this kind of sexual relationship is very ridiculous. Many views will tell you what normal men and women should be like, this theory or that theory. He says all those are ridiculous, no need to pay attention to them.

In fact, Western society has tried to force all expressions of love and devotion into sexual activity, or else prohibit them altogether.

In Western society -- and now the Eastern world also has this trend -- whenever love and devotion are mentioned, they must first be linked to sexual relations; if they have nothing to do with sex, they are denied and prohibited.

Sexual expression is considered a safe method of utilizing the great potential of human emotion.

We think, and humanity generally thinks, that sex is a safe method for expressing the great potential of human emotion -- safe and universally accepted.

When society seems to you to become licentious, it is in many ways actually repressed and inhibited.

Actually it is not like that. When you feel that your society looks very licentious, actually this view -- that we consider sex to be a very safe method for fulfilling human emotion -- is in many ways actually repressed and inhibited. This sexuality is repressed and inhibited, rather than saying that a licentious society's sexuality is free and open -- it is exactly the opposite. Be sure to remember this. Apart from sexual freedom, all other choices are denied. Such a social view actually implies a hidden meaning: in the expression of love, apart from sex being able to express love, all other expressions of love are denied.

This great force of love and devotion is withdrawn from the areas of individual creativity expressed through work. It is withdrawn from expression through government or law. The expression of love and devotion through meaningful private relationships is denied, and forced into a narrow channel of expression through sexuality. And so it does indeed become truly meaningless.

This is Seth's viewpoint. Let me briefly explain the meaning of this passage again: the great force of love and devotion should be expressed through our individual creativity in work, and it should be expressed through our government and the laws we implement -- our laws should embody love, embody the mercy and devotion of the law. But we cannot see love in the law, and we cannot see love in the actions of our government. What we see are cold institutions, a forbidding, stern, and majestic government. He does not want to express love in government and law, because he considers it inappropriate; this love and devotion should be expressed in sexuality. Government should be a serious thing without love; do not talk about love in work either -- work is just work. Your devotion in work, your love and devotion for work, is also considered inappropriate. Including in private relationships: if two people are not husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend, your private relationship should preferably develop with boundaries -- if it develops beyond such a relationship, it is easily suspected of something. Why? Because we humans always look at everything through the narrow channel of sexual expression. If we look at things from that perspective, then love and devotion truly become meaningless. That is the meaning of Seth's passage.

Gender Identification Causes the Loss of Half of One's Potential

Some women working for equal rights would say that, because women's abilities have been suppressed, humanity has used only half of its potential. But broadly speaking, when identity is regarded primarily as a matter of sexual orientation, everyone, including men, is a victim.

The equal rights movement is the women's movement, which advocates equal rights for men and women. They believe that women's abilities have been suppressed, so humanity can use only half of its potential. Then Seth says that this is not actually the case: men's abilities have also been suppressed, and men also use only half of their abilities. So humanity as a whole has used only half of its abilities to build our human society, our human home. What a pity. Everyone has lost half of their abilities.

Generally speaking, there is a particular, broad biological orientation. But human mental and emotional characteristics are not distributed according to sex at all.

Simply put, when each person is born, their outward biological sex orientation has already been determined, whether it leans toward male or female. But on the mental and emotional levels, human characteristics are completely unaffected by outward sex.

This identification cuts the individual in half, so that each person uses only half of their own potential. This creates a division in all of your cultural activities.

All of our cultural activities distinguish people by sex, and all of them create this kind of division.

On the other hand, many of you are taught that sexual expression is wrong, evil, or shameful. You are also told that if you do not express your sexuality, you cannot express natural repression. Furthermore, you are led to believe that you must first force yourself to like this ambiguous sexual nature.

This is what many people think. Many people are taught that sexual expression is inherently wrong, that anything sexual beyond reproducing is wrong, evil, lewd, and shameful. Then people also tell you that if you do not express your sexuality, you cannot express this natural repression. Furthermore, you are led to believe that you must first force yourself to like this ambiguous sexual nature—they tell you that you must first identify with your sex and acknowledge its natural attributes, but then they also tell you that sex is bad. Tell me, how conflicted is that? Human society first tells you that every one of you must belong to a particular sex: you are either male or female. Then it tells you that this thing related to being male and female is something very evil, wrong, and shameful. A person cannot escape their understanding of sex, and must first affirm their own understanding of their gender, only to be told that this is bad. Tell me, how is this person tormenting themselves? This kind of thing has happened in many dynasties and many eras. Women, for example, have been a primary target of this mistreatment. Men, of course, have also suffered deeply from it, but women have suffered somewhat more. From childhood, women are taught: you are a girl, and this is what will happen to you; in relations between the sexes, you are the one who gets bullied, the passive one, and this is what will happen to you. Then this is instilled in them from childhood—and the result is that girls are told that talking openly about sex is bad, improper, and not ladylike enough. Once you identify solely with your female identity, they tell you that everything you do on the basis of that female identity is bad. So wearing revealing clothes is bad, attracting men is bad, and if many men like you and pursue you, that can only prove that you are promiscuous. It cannot prove anything else. Tell me, how does a person live with such inner conflict? That is just how conflicted they are.

Many people believe that good women do not enjoy sex.

They think that an excellent woman should not indulge in sexual pleasure. This statement applies to men too—how could a good man spend all day chasing women? It is the same principle, but women face more restrictions. This old belief has not disappeared. Seth says, do not think that this belief has disappeared just because human society has entered a civilized age. It has not disappeared. Isn't that right? Just observe the people around you and you will know.

Yet women are taught that natural expressions of love and relaxed caresses are inappropriate unless they are immediately carried through to sexual climax.

Women are taught that any natural expression of love—and natural expressions of love include bodily contact, stroking, and touching—is inappropriate and should be forbidden, except in one circumstance: with your lawful sexual partner, you can go straight to bed, then begin making love, all the way to climax. Such behavior is acceptable; such touching and caressing are acceptable. Beyond that, do not do any of it. So you restrict the natural expression of love. Of course, psychologists today have discussed this a great deal, and we will not go into it further here.

Men are taught to measure their worth according to how they are controlled by the machinery of the sex drive. They are taught to suppress expressions of love, regarding them as a weakness, and to have sex as often as possible.

How are men taught? In our human society, men are taught that they should not ordinarily display loving behavior, that men should not readily reveal their feelings, that you cannot casually and naturally express your love for the other person. You should ordinarily focus on your work, your career, and your lofty ideals in life, rather than thinking all day about these matters between men and women. We often say that even a hero cannot pass the test of a beautiful woman—if you are a hero, you should be able to pass that test. What does passing that test mean? Being unaffected by love. If you cannot pass it, then you are no good. You cannot accomplish great things if you spend all day chasing women. That will not do. This is how we educate people. But on the other hand, you also teach these men to have sex with women as often as possible. When it comes to educating men, all kinds of films, television, media, and other sources actually imply that men should acquire as many new partners as possible. Then they find all kinds of reasons, saying that this was how things were in ancient times: a man had more sexual partners so that his descendants could reproduce more widely and perpetuate the life of humanity as a whole, and that this is an attribute inherited from the history of human development. From all kinds of angles, they imply that men should have more sex with women. Now put these two views together—you cannot ordinarily express love, yet you are supposed to sleep with as many women as possible—and doesn't this often leave a man falling apart? He is very confused. He cannot figure out what is going on himself.

In such a sexual climate, it is no wonder that you become confused.

We have always been confused about this issue of sex. Men and women today encounter the same problem: they are completely conflicted. You cannot ordinarily express love, and then you are required to do this and that.

Gender Division Begins in Childhood

When boys are taught to identify solely with the father image, and girls with the mother image, the sexual division has already begun.

When does humanity's sexual division begin? It begins when children are required that boys should be like their fathers and girls should be like their mothers.

Here, without realizing it, you weave guilt into the process of growth.

Every one of us parents feels in this process that we are doing something very right. But actually what are you doing? To put it bluntly, you are harming the child. You weave this kind of guilt about gender into the child's life and growth very early on. You allow him only one direction of development, only one mode of development: boys must grow up like your father, girls must grow up like your mother, and all kinds of behavioral norms are like this, otherwise it is wrong, inappropriate, and should be punished.

A child of either sex will quite naturally identify with both parents.

Whether boy or girl, they should quite naturally identify with both parents, identifying with both the father and the mother. In the child's eyes, parents have no gender -- remember this firmly, in the child's eyes parents have no gender. It is we who forcibly instill in him a gendered cognition, saying this is mother, female, and father, male. Many parents take pride in this and teach their children very early on.

Any forced direction of the child toward such a single identification is very limiting. In such a case, whenever such a child feels a natural connection with the other parent, guilt begins to arise.

What will the child become as a result of such education? If a boy has too much contact with his mother, too much natural connection, he will feel guilt. This is not obvious in childhood, but it becomes especially obvious at puberty -- at puberty, boys will not let their mothers touch them, will not let their mothers have contact with them. From childhood, for example, the mother bathed the child all the way until he grew up, but after he grew up, one day the child suddenly would no longer let her touch him, would no longer let her bathe him. The same is true for boys and girls alike: a girl was originally very close to her father, played very well with him, every girl is the apple of her father's eye, but at a certain age, suddenly this girl becomes incomparably distant from her father, becomes so polite, so official, so distant. It is very strange, humans are not allowed to think about this. Why? It is because from childhood the parents told him, you are a girl, you should be like your mother; you are a boy, you are like your father. Then they also taught him that if it is not a relationship between man and woman, not a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, not husband and wife, then any expression of love and any physical contact between you is improper and should be restricted. And a child and his parents will certainly not be boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife, so his relationship with his parents will definitely be restricted. If he still wants to maintain this intimate relationship with his parents, he will naturally develop a sense of guilt. Who gave him this guilt? You gave it to him.

In your human society, because certain characteristics are considered to belong exclusively to males or females, the stronger these natural tendencies are, the more the child is directed to ignore them. Children are also encouraged to ignore certain portions of the personality that are related to the sex with which he is taught he cannot identify.

That is, for boys and girls, we tell them, you can only accept this male part of yourself as a boy, and girls can only accept the female part. You cannot express the other part, that is not accepted. So in the process of growing up, he denies a part of his humanity. Of the very complete attributes of humanity, he only accepts half.

The situation of squeezing the personality into a gendered mold begins very early.

It begins very early, already when you buy girls' skirts and flowery clothes and boys' masculine toys from childhood.

A continuing guilt is initiated, because the child knows without doubt that his own reality transcends such simple orientations.

Why is there guilt? Because the child instinctively knows that within himself there is no such gender distinction, that he transcends gender. He himself knows his own attributes, and in his inner natural emotions he transcends this gender distinction, transcends this simple gender orientation. But parents and adults will forcibly teach him this viewpoint -- that this is not good. And within himself, in his essence, he has this feeling, and his true humanity transcends these things. Because a child cannot say so many things, he will therefore have guilt. In other words, a child instinctively wants to maintain an intimate relationship with both mother and father at the same time, but at a certain point, he is taught not to, to feel guilt: you can only maintain intimacy with your mother, and boys should maintain intimacy with their fathers. If you still maintain intimacy across genders, it is regarded as inappropriate and untimely.

The more forcefully a child is imposed with such an artificial identification, the greater the inner rebellion he feels.

That is, the more forcefully you instill this thing in the child, the greater the child's rebellion. Why? Because it does not match his inner nature. The child originally does not have this gendered viewpoint; it is parents and adults who forcibly instill it in him. The more you instill it in him, the more it conflicts with that spiritual thing in his inner essence, so his rebellious psychology, his rebellion, becomes greater.

He lacks a suitable image of a father or a mother.

We have all taught it wrong. He says what we give to children harms them far more than it teaches them. You think you are educating your child, that you are teaching him good things, but he says you harm him more than you teach him. Speaking of this, does everyone get a shiver and reflect for a moment?

So why is the book The Nature of the Psyche so important? Because this is a topic we cannot skip over. In this world, biologically speaking, there are only two types: male and female. If our understanding of this issue is vague or wrong, then in the development of human society it will inevitably be very twisted, or we will not bring out our full potential.

The psyche, with its great endowments, always feels thwarted and attempts to take countermeasures.

The psyche itself is strong, with great endowments, and it is very frustrated because there are too many restrictions. It is thwarted everywhere in life. It was originally a normal, positive-energy thing, but it is pointed at as if it has ill intentions, as if it has some scheme, so it rebels.

But before it can rebel, the child is sent off to school, further continuing this process of coercion.

At just six years old they are sent to school and reconditioned again. How miserable these children are.

Therefore the areas of curiosity and learning are divided for boys and girls.

Curiosity is no longer valued, and is even suppressed. Learning becomes the main focus of his life, and curiosity is no longer important.

What is within the boy does indeed represent an unexpressed portion of his personality. Not because any mental or emotional characteristics naturally outweigh others, but because of artificial specialization.

The merits or potentials of the female part within the boy are not expressed, not because the natural characteristics of emotion or spirit restrict him from expressing those female merits, but because our cognition has specialized and restricted him -- saying you cannot express this, you may not do this. Boys are taught from childhood not to cry, you are a boy, you cannot cry when you fall down, that is how it is. And girls are taught many restrictions about being female: you are a girl, you are a treasure, there are many things you do not need to do, cannot do. The same applies to the male within women -- the male attributes within the girl's psyche are also suppressed, by the same principle.

Again, you accept this version of humanity in line with your concepts of the nature of consciousness.

This is that you humans have accepted your own concepts about the nature of consciousness -- that is, the concept of gender imposed upon humanity -- and then you have approved and accepted this form of expression of humanity, this version.

Those concepts are changing, but as they change, humanity must accept its true humanity.

People must first accept their true humanity, this cross-gender, trans-gender humanity.

When this happens, your understanding will allow you to perceive the magical nature of reality that you have recognized through the ages.

If you come to recognize the true nature of your humanity, then you can understand the essence of the world of the gods, the essence of the mythological world, that you have been seeking through the ages.

You will no longer need to clothe them in the limited disguises of sex.

He means that in the world of the gods there is no gender, there are no distinctions of male gods and female gods. These are all disguises that humans have put on them. In the world of the gods there are none of these.

Your religious concepts, and the related imagery connected with them, will change considerably.

If you can recognize that there is no distinction between male and female here, that is how it is.

Religion, Government, and Gender

Religion and government have an uneasy alliance.

They are often linked together, with religion frequently used as a tool by government to rule the people, and religion also using government to grow and strengthen itself. Between the two of them is an uneasy alliance, so Seth's choice of words is very interesting: they are uneasy, using each other, each harboring its own agenda.

Men rule both of these. Yet those leading religious organizations, at least their intuition, at least their direct foundation, still know that their intuition is their foundation. Although men rule both, because intuition leans more toward the feminine.

Because what religion emphasizes is spirituality and spirituality, that is, non-material things, they know that their intuition is their foundation. Although men rule both of these -- because the foundation of intuition leans toward the feminine.

They often, both by government leaders, use the same methods of suppressing and exploiting emotion to manipulate the lower structures of religion.

Religion often learns to make use of how government controls the people, how it establishes layer upon layer of institutional control mechanisms -- it uses emotional methods to control the lower structures. Religion learned this, and government also learned from religion. They learned from each other, and neither learned anything good -- they were both learning the bad.

Heresy was considered feminine and subversive. For the acceptable expression of religious fervor as it was structured, heresy carried the threat of destroying it.

Within the church, the feminine element was always considered suspect; they were never quite at ease with it. And in early Christianity, some people feared that the virgin would become a goddess, and they guarded against her at every turn. At the very beginning, Christianity had Jesus born of the virgin Mary, and there were many legends about goddesses, so they were very afraid that these virgins would become goddesses.

Some surviving branches of Christianity are exactly like this.

They resisted women and disliked women, and it is still the same today. Many rules in religion today are like this: for example, women cannot become pope, women cannot become bishops. Look at the cardinals -- is there a single woman among them? Those who preach must be priests; why can it not be women? Why must a priest do the preaching? So are women always a notch below men in the Christian understanding? Very strange, is it not.

The parallel development between religion and government always reflects the condition of consciousness and its purposes.

It is the same in government. It is much better now, but in the past, it was impossible for women to hold power in government. Now many heads of state are women. Religion and government alike both reflect the development of our human consciousness: whatever degree our human consciousness has developed to, it is reflected outwardly in religion and government.

This heretical activity gave far more leeway to sexual identity and expression.

Heresy was not restricted by these traditional religions; it gave sexual identity and far more room for expression than traditional religions did.

Up until the sixteenth century, this heresy still existed. And the so-called occult underground religious systems tried to encourage the development of individual intuition.

Many secret religions encouraged individual intuition.

However, any true spiritual development of the personality will necessarily lead to an understanding of the nature of the psyche. And the nature of the psyche is far too vast for any basic confusion of sexual identity.

When you come to recognize the nature of the psyche, the more you understand it, the more you will find that compared with any understanding based on the two sexes, its depth, breadth, and realm are far greater and vaster -- to consider this question in terms of sex is far too narrow. The nature of the psyche completely transcends all of this.

For example, the very idea of reincarnation clearly shows the change of sexual orientation.

Our church has the concept of reincarnation and rebirth, and it clearly tells you that in this life you are male and in the next life you are female; in this life female and in the next life male -- it has already clearly told you that sex is not important, and that sexual orientation can change at any time.

It also shows the existence of a self different from one's sexual orientation.

If we consider that reincarnation happens simultaneously, that all time happens simultaneously, then at the same time the self you think you are is both male and female, because you may be reincarnated simultaneously in different genders in different times and spaces.

Thus when this self also expresses itself in the posture of a fixed gender, to a considerable degree, sexual beliefs are responsible for blocking the perception of reincarnation.

For what? Reincarnational memories will necessarily make you recognize experiences related to your present sexual role, and those unconscious existences of the opposite sex are also presented to the psyche. You do not even know what he is trying to say with this sentence. I think what he means is that any reincarnational memory will necessarily let you know that you yourself have existed in different genders, and this fact that you yourself have existed in different genders is presented to your psyche, to your inner self, or to your spirit through the inner unconscious. It escapes your conscious perception, and they are part of your personality -- your existence as the opposite sex, as another gender, is also part of your personality, because all reincarnations are part of your personality.

Therefore, while identifying so specifically with your gender, you also have to suppress those memories that might limit or break that identification.

Because you identify so strongly with the gender of this life, including the strong identification with the gender of that other life in your other reincarnations, it will naturally suppress your reincarnational memories. Because when reincarnational memories come back, you will know that you actually exist across genders, that you have another gender identity. Under such circumstances, fearing that you might become confused, or fearing that you might break your own narrow gender identification, it restricts your memories so that you cannot recall that in the past you once existed as the opposite sex, completely opposite to your present gender. So you are suppressed -- who does not want you to remember? Your own beliefs do not let you remember; you restrict yourself.

In previous centuries, the church's effort to separate the expression of love and devotion from sexuality was greater than its restraint upon the sexual nature and sexual expression of priests.

For many centuries, the church -- here referring to Christianity -- always tried to separate love and devotion from the sexual aspect. Because the most obvious expression of love and devotion is in the sexual aspect, in the relationship between the two sexes, where this love and devotion is expressed naturally. But the church wanted you to love the church and wanted you to devote yourself to the church, so it wanted to separate love and devotion from the relationship between the two sexes. Its effort in this regard exceeded its restraint upon priests in terms of their sexual nature and sexual expression. Actually, the church had strict requirements and regulations for priests and bishops, but they often violated them. So the effort the church put into restraining their violations of sexual rules was far less than its effort to separate love and devotion from sexuality.

In the Middle Ages, for example, a high proportion of priests had illegitimate children, and these were considered the weak, superfluous products of the flesh.

It really is bad -- a priest having illegitimate children, what kind of behavior is that? But when you think about the fallen condition of humanity, it becomes an understandable, comprehensible kind of demonstration -- oh, he could not control his desires, could not control temptation, priests are human too, and so on; it can be understood and comprehended. But the premise is that as long as the priest's love and devotion still belonged to the church, and he did not squander it on the mothers of these offspring, did not squander it on these women, then it was fine.

If not condoned, this situation could be ignored.

These priests, who by regulation could not marry, not only had sexual relations with these women but even produced illegitimate children. The church turned a blind eye to this, on the premise that these priests and bishops gave their love and devotion to the church, and did not give their love and devotion to these women. In other words, you can see how twisted these priests were -- they could not resist the desires of the flesh and went to bed with these girls. Many were nuns, because they had little contact with women from ordinary families. When preaching, they would often seduce these young girls. Regarding this subject, there is a famous book called The Decameron¹⁸. If you have read The Decameron¹⁹, you will know how thoroughly it satirized the medieval church -- it was extremely sarcastic, mocking, and teasing about the church, pointing out that these priests misbehaved every day. And the church turned a blind eye to this.

It is still the same in society today. Just a while ago, whether it was a famous church in New York or in Europe, the New York church was exposed for having sexually abused countless boys and girls over a period of decades, over several decades²⁰. The number still cannot be accurately counted to this day, because some people are too ashamed to speak of it, and some do not want to bring up these past events again, and in the end it was left unresolved. The church committed such a huge scandal, and it was still left unresolved. In Europe, it seems that a number of cardinals were eventually exposed for sexually abusing underage boys and girls²¹ -- you see how despicable their methods were, not even adults, all underage girls and boys. This matter was also left unresolved; some punishments were handed out or whatever, but no one was seen being sentenced. The church shielded them all, using their influence, power, and authority, using all kinds of means of coercion and exploitation, whether through the court system or the victims' families, suppressing them in every way. This matter has been endlessly recurring in modern society and over the centuries, everywhere.

So Seth laid all these problems out in the open -- Seth is also merciless; while discussing the essence of this issue, he exposed them all. Seth himself did this kind of thing too. He introduced himself as having once been a pope of no great fame in one lifetime, and when he was pope he had, it seems, three children, with several women -- one was his servant, one was his housekeeper, and another was a nun. Some of these illegitimate children were placed in monasteries to be raised.

Nuns, however, were placed in a humiliating position, and convents became a refuge for many women who, even under those circumstances, still managed to educate themselves.

Nuns occupied a relatively low level in the entire church system; they could never become a very high rank, could not become bishops, and even less could they become pope. They became an auxiliary part of the church.

A considerable number of nuns, of course, bore children fathered by those priests.

Seth does not leave any face at all.

And these children were sometimes servants in the monasteries and convents. However, in various convents, there were many rebellions by the nuns.

What did these women discover? Although in isolated convents without men, they could also operate very well, very efficiently, completely self-sufficient, and lived very well. They would discover: then why should we still be attached to this male-dominated church or male-dominated society? Why should we be bullied and oppressed by you? We women can also do things very well on our own, without any male participation; we keep things in perfect order, very organized, very efficient. Then they began to question the overall structure of the church, the legitimacy and rationality of the church, and their own position within it. Some groups left -- entire convents ran away collectively and formed their own small communities, especially in France and Spain, where this happened a lot.

Yet the church never found a suitable method to deal with its women.

The church never found a good way to deal with these women in its ranks, or to deal with the intuitive element in their faith -- because women actually represented the intuitive part of their faith, but they kept suppressing it, kept repressing it.

Every time another virgin saint, virgin woman, or mother goddess appeared in some corner of the world, its terror of the goddess resurfaced.

Whenever a locally recognized image of a saintly woman or mother goddess appeared anywhere, and there was even the slightest possibility of her becoming a goddess, the entire church was extremely terrified and extremely worried. Because they feared returning to a process dominated by women. If you have read the book Conversations with God, you know that before this male-dominated era, the whole of human society was female-dominated²². So the church was especially afraid of returning to a society dominated by a goddess, rather than a male god -- they even assigned genders to God, which is quite interesting.

There were also some women who were considered monks; like monastics, they lived solitary lives in single rooms for many years. They had no works bearing their names, no religious works with their names on them, because they used male names instead.

This is a bit like Mulan. Their level of learning was very high, but they did not dare to use female names on their writings; they all used male pen names.

Needless to say, in such an environment, lesbian and homosexual relationships flourished.

Seth says, do I even need to say this? In these convents and monasteries, among the young men and women, homosexual relationships certainly flourished. Because apart from those high-ranking clergy who could use their power to get their hands on the nuns, most people lived in these same-sex social circles, so it inevitably led to the prevalence of male and female homosexuality.

As long as the relationship was essentially sexual, the church turned a blind eye.

Whether male homosexuality or whatever, as long as it was based on sex and did not divert love and devotion outside the church, as long as love and devotion remained in the church, he was not worried about your purely sexual pleasures. You just had to devote yourself to the church, to the Lord, to the whole religious enterprise.

If they were not this, they would have no real worry.

They were not worried about you engaging in homosexuality.

Thus intellect and emotion became more separated.

Because male and female homosexuality also involves emotion, but he told you not to place your emotions there, but to place your emotions on the church. Once he said that, they became separated.

The natural result of this, of course, became an overemphasis upon dogma.

Emphasis on rules and rituals, which had to be colorful and magnificent. If you have attended religious ceremonies, you know that these ceremonies, large and small, are incomparably gorgeous and magnificent. Because the church wanted to create an allowable outlet for the psyche -- through the magnificence of rituals and rules, and the strictness of dogma and canon law, to find an outlet for the psyche.

The church believed that sex belonged to the lower or animal instincts, and likewise ordinary human love.

The church considered this kind of thing based on sex or based on love to be lower animal instincts, so they felt it did not matter -- the only difference between you was whether you followed canon law or not, whether this person's level was high or low, whether he could control his animal instincts. He did not care. So it was this kind of church and this kind of atmosphere that led to the whole church being in such a foul state. They considered the sexual abuse of boys and girls to be a kind of sexual release, a helplessness from not having controlled their animal instincts well. They did not consider it an essential error -- my soul is noble, my soul is devoted to God and given to the church; my control over the instincts of the flesh is just a little lacking, but that does not affect the nobility of my soul. So the whole church turned a blind eye to this matter.

In such an atmosphere, you can imagine what kind of people the church would cultivate. So those who bring their children to church should think carefully. I think this is one of the greatest paradoxes and misconceptions in American society or Western society. America is a country governed by law; it does not allow religion to interfere with the rule of law. This was established at the founding of the nation. And in all public schools -- private schools do not matter -- as long as it is a public school, it is not allowed to teach anything related to religion²³; nothing religious can be taught. It seems very scientific, as if religion is excluded from the entire social system. Because their view is simple: a person who is not yet an adult, not yet mature, cannot judge whether this faith and this religion is useful to him or whether he approves of it, and if you indoctrinate him from childhood, he has no choice; he is just brought along by his parents.

Although it sounds very reasonable not to teach it in schools, do not forget that in churches children are always brought along; it becomes an important family activity. Every Sunday at service, whether the early or late session, every family brings their children. Children who have just begun to understand things, just barely able to understand, are brought by their parents, not understanding anything at all, without any judgment, and are infected by the solemn rituals, the sacred things, the beautiful choral songs, and the devout expressions of their parents. They regard their parents as heaven, and when their parents worship someone else to such a degree, they think that thing must be even more powerful, because even their parents worship it so much. You can imagine what a terrible behavior this is -- they do not allow minors to be taught religion in schools, but they allow minors to enter churches. I think legislation should be passed so that all minors are not allowed to receive anything religious before the age of 18, and even parents taking them to church should not be allowed. Only such legislation can truly guarantee that a society is kept away from the influence and misleading of religion. When they grow up and have their own judgment and ability to distinguish right from wrong, they will choose for themselves whether what this religion says is right and whether it meets their faith requirements, rather than being indoctrinated from childhood when they have no choice or discernment. Moreover, this church is such a foul church; bringing your children in from a young age is pushing them into a pit of fire. If you have seen the indictments or prosecution documents from the New York Attorney General regarding these churches, you will know that the crimes are absolutely horrifying and beyond description in words²⁴ -- all very young children, violated by these clergy. Why would you bring your children to these places again? I just do not understand. These parents, you can believe on your own, but do not harm the next generation anymore, because you yourself are also a victim; you were also brought to church by your parents step by step in this way.

On the other hand, the church also believed that --

Spiritual love and devotion must not be contaminated by sexual expression.

On the one hand, he condoned and allowed these acts by the clergy, considering sex itself to be a lowly, animal, instinctual thing, while at the same time he feared that this spiritual love and devotion would be contaminated by this lowly, animal, instinctual sex. You can see how conflicted he was in the middle of all this.

Any normal deep relationship would be threatened by devotional expression.

The church did not allow any intimate, deep relationship, because it believed that all of these threatened your devotion to the church. So within the church, the deepest relationship must be your relationship with the Lord, followed by your relationship with the church or the priest. If there were any deeper relationship above these, it absolutely could not be allowed. This is the church's current view.

With that, he finished this session. Finally, the most heartfelt blessings.

Session 774: The Nature of Sex and Love

This session was held on Monday, May 3, 1976, at 9:24 p.m. Rob said that since Seth began this course on human sexuality, it so happened that they seemed to be receiving more letters on this subject in the mail than before. Rob found this quite remarkable -- the book had not yet been published, and in the process of writing and speaking about it, readers' letters had already begun to touch on more sex-related topics. This kind of synchronicity was very interesting. Rob said it was a pity that these issues should have been discussed earlier, because people were quite concerned about this subject.

The weather had already warmed up, and Rob said they could have lunch on the picnic table in the two-car garage -- that is, their garage; in America, garages are connected to the house, like a room with a door -- in half of the garage space. Jane often wrote there, with the garage door open, so she could enjoy the mountain view through the open garage door.

Seth came through and said right away:

When you declare that sexual behavior is evil, indecent, or shameful, and then hide it, and regard it as basically animalistic, you deny that this sexual behavior is something of your own self.

That is to say, you say this is not ours, this is an animal instinct, we humans are more noble -- how could I be unable to walk straight when I see a beautiful woman? How could my voice turn coy when I talk to a handsome man? I am not that kind of person. Actually, this is a kind of obsession with sexual behavior. The more you do this, the more you prove that you are obsessed with sex.

There is another viewpoint: proclaiming in the marketplace, in an exaggerated way, that sexual behavior is beneficial. Nowadays many articles and many columns openly say that sex is good, especially for women -- because there has been more repression of women, so women should be encouraged to talk boldly about sex and dare to express their needs and desires regarding sex. Seth says, you are also obsessed with sex in this way.

The third kind:

When you place strict, impractical prohibitions upon sexual expression... and when you set up equally impractical standards of ultimate performance... you are also excessively obsessed with sexual behavior.

We often place strict, impractical prohibitions on sex, such as what age is not allowed, what circumstances are not permitted. At the same time, we also set up many standards -- only this is proper, that kind of sex is good, that kind of sexual behavior is not good. Both of these, strict prohibitions and ultimate standards, are excessive obsessions with sexual behavior.

To summarize briefly: the first kind is degrading sex, saying that sex is evil, indecent, shameful, and then hiding it, desperately treating it as an animal instinct -- this is an obsession with sex. The second kind is proclaiming the benefits of sex everywhere -- this is still an obsession with sex. The third kind is placing many restrictive prohibitions, conditions, requirements, and norms on sex -- this approach is likewise an obsession with sex.

He also said:

Sexual freedom does not involve a kind of mandatory promiscuity... that would make young people and members of the opposite sex feel unnatural if their coming together did not lead to bed.

Seth emphasized: when I say sexual freedom, I am not saying you should go around having promiscuous sex -- do not blame me, it has nothing to do with me. I am also not saying that so-called sexual freedom means that when young men and women get together, it is unnatural if they do not go to bed, and that going to bed is the natural thing.

In social circles a couple of years ago, there was this thing called "courtesy sex." Two people actually had no desire to go to bed, but after watching a movie together, having a beer, eating some skewers, a man and a woman spending a long time alone together -- they might be colleagues, friends, or even platonic male and female friends -- if they did not go to bed, it seemed like a kind of impoliteness. It was as if you were a blow to the other person's sexual attractiveness, making the other person feel they had no appeal at all. In order not to let the other person feel that kind of defeat, this "courtesy sex" would happen, to soothe the other person's fragile self-esteem. What Seth means is exactly this: I did not say that whenever a man and a woman interact they must go to bed, and that not going to bed is unnatural -- that is not what I mean.

When you separate sexual activity from love and devotion, you begin to program it.

Sex and love and devotion are originally natural things. When you separate them, it becomes a kind of programming. Then the church and the state can easily demand what? To attract you into losing this loyalty and love in your heart, leaving you with only a sexual expression stripped of its deepest meaning.

Religion and the state both demand that you give your love and devotion to the state or to religion -- the state requires everyone to swear an oath of dedication and loyalty to the country, and religion is the same. You strip love and devotion out of your sex life and turn them into devotion to religion and devotion to the state. Then what is left? A sexual expression stripped of meaning, without love and devotion.

Seth quickly emphasized again:

I am not saying here that any given sexual act is wrong if it is not accompanied by love and devotion.

He also did not say that sexual behavior without love and devotion is meaningless or shameful. He repeatedly emphasized this, afraid that you would go from one extreme to the other. This kind of "neither this nor that" argument appears often in Seth's books -- he is talking about a kind of nondual thing, neither this nor that. You must understand this. He brought up two completely opposite behaviors, and then said neither of them is what I mean.

He said:

If you reach the point where it is unnatural to feel sexual desire for someone you do not like or look down upon.

After separating love from sex, if you still feel sexual desire for someone you do not like and look down upon, this will make you feel unnatural. For example: many men have visited prostitutes. He actually looks down upon these prostitutes themselves, but does he still have sexual impulses and sexual desire? If he had no sexual desire, why would he go to them? So he is inwardly very conflicted. Women have similar problems too, though not as common as men visiting prostitutes.

I still remember that in early 2019, there was an entertainment venue in Shanghai called the White Horse Nightclub²⁵ -- a wealthy woman kept a "little duck" and threw him a belated 28th birthday party, giving him 28 birthday gifts. This little duck was overjoyed and posted about it on his social media to show off, but the police discovered it, and the entire venue was taken down in one sweep. This is a typical case that was only exposed -- before it was exposed, who knows how many female consumers this White Horse Nightclub had received. People end up in this kind of awkward situation: they have this need on an instinctual level, but they also look down upon these people, so they feel unnatural.

In your human species, or in the natural biology of animals, the sexual concepts of dominance and submission have no place.

Seth says, whether in humans or animals, in sex there is no master-servant concept of one dominating and one submitting -- no one is on top and no one is below, no one is high and mighty and no one is inferior. Sex is just sex. Sex itself is equal. When two people are together, it does not mean one has to do something to the other. But people impose their own values, status, and social attributes onto sex, adding distinctions of high and low, noble and base. These are all unnatural. The animal kingdom does not have this, and humans originally did not either -- you imposed it upon it.

From the time when love and devotion were separated from the essence of sex, dominance and submission were often used in religious literature. Only through religious vision or experience could love and devotion be united with the essence of sex, because only God's love was considered good enough to justify what would otherwise be an animalistic sexual issue.

The meaning of this passage is quite plain: love and devotion are originally the most essential parts of the nature of sex, but people separated them out and assigned them to the level of religion or the state. Religion places dominance and submission into the consideration of human nature. Since love and devotion are the essence of sex, then any sexual behavior should contain love and devotion; and since it contains love and devotion, there is no issue of one side dominating the other or one side being lower than the other. But religion strips love and devotion out of sex, saying that love and devotion should only be given to the church, to the Lord, to God -- you humans are not worthy of using these things, you are just lowly animals, your sexual relationships are not worthy of such lofty words as love and devotion, you only exist to reproduce. Before God, only God is worthy of such words. The church did not say this explicitly -- I am saying, from my perspective, what they did not say; maybe they never thought this way at all.

You can love and devote yourself to the Lord, to God, to religious leaders; but among you fellow believers, among you submissive and obedient people, do not use words like love and devotion -- you are just an animalistic expression. And only God's love is considered good enough; your love is nothing at all.

Conversely:

The concepts of dominance and submission are connected with the categories and development of consciousness, because in the interpretation mentioned earlier in this book, we took one main line of consciousness, and to that extent it is more inclined toward a dominant nature.

Why do we have the consciousness of dominance and submission? Because humanity has different themes in different historical periods, and the theme of our current historical period is inclined toward a dominant nature. We are currently inclined, to some extent, toward a dominant nature, and this is the main line of our consciousness. Everywhere there is dominance, authority, all kinds of organizations and governments emphasizing rule. This is the need of our historical era; there is no way around it.

Remember that at the beginning of this book, it was discussed that humanity has different historical themes and era themes in different historical periods, and human consciousness and spiritual matters are inevitably influenced by the theme of the era. Although some secondary themes are interspersed throughout -- family, faith, love, and so on -- they must conform to the theme of the entire era. The root of dominance and submission lies here: because our era is inclined toward a dominant nature.

You consider this to be essentially male... so the female principle became connected with the earth and all those other elements of life, over which you, as a species, wanted to gain dominance.

Because we consider this era to be a male era, a patriarchal society, a patriarchal world, the female principle became connected with the earth and all other elements of life. To put it bluntly, you treat women as possessions, like land and property, to be ruled and managed, to be made into objects of submission -- you have objectified women. Everyone is competing for the opposite sex as if competing for resources. This is the current state of human society, whether you admit it or not.

Seth does not mince words. Although he has already softened and beautified many things, on certain facts he still inadvertently speaks the truth. Our society is male-leaning, intellect-leaning, logic-leaning. Anything intuitive, emotional, feeling-based, or impulsive is pushed aside and suppressed; it cannot be allowed to become mainstream. Mainstream society must be calm, rational, scientifically rigorous, and male-leaning in its social attributes. Even the gods nowadays are all male, because divine authority is male, and religion is also male.

Love and devotion are originally the female principle, female attributes, connected with all facets of nature. But because the whole society is male, anything involving the female must be taken away -- why? Because female-leaning things cannot become the mainstream of society; they must be taken away and made into appendages of the male.

So love and devotion become the exclusive domain of the church and the state. Both of these are male-leaning organizations. Whether religion or the state, both seize love and devotion, making you able to love and devote yourself only to them, turning you into their appendage, submitting to them. If you do not submit, you are treasonous -- if you say you do not love your country, you cannot survive in any country in the world; you will be branded as unpatriotic and unable to stand on your own feet. How interesting this society is -- the state has been elevated above human nature, and I cannot even decide for myself whom I love and whom I do not love. You think this is perfectly natural, but if you look at it from another angle, is it not utterly absurd? How can the state be placed above human nature? What is the state, anyway? But if you dare to advocate this view now, just try it.

So a religion that reflects your state of consciousness in this way can control the power of love and use it for the purposes of dominance.

Seth points out the essence of the problem: you are using the banner of love, in the name of love, to carry out dominance. Whether it is religion recruiting followers and members, or the state governing its people, it is all done in the name of love, turned into the orientation of the state.

A man's love and devotion is a political gain.

A man's natural, instinctive love and devotion toward the opposite sex should be handed over to the level of the state or the church -- this becomes a political gain. So it exploits this gendered love to do the work of dominance.

His enthusiasm is as important as governmental wealth, because a nation can depend upon the devotion of its military officers, just as many fanatics will work for a cause without pay.

Your enthusiasm, which should naturally be expressed between you and the opposite sex, is forcibly taken away, so that you give your greatest enthusiasm to social organizations, the church, or the state. Your enthusiasm is collected by the state like governmental wealth, and there cannot be the slightest deviation. If you dare to divert the enthusiasm of the masses away from the state and toward some other direction, then you had better watch out. The state depends on the love and devotion of its military officers for the army and the country -- whoever controls the army controls the state. And there are many people who work without pay; people in extremist terrorist organizations will even give up their lives to work for the organization.

(Seth paused here for a minute, a long pause. Because he also realized that this topic was too serious and heavy -- he was directly pointing out the essence of the state and society. He was thinking about how to continue, how to make this issue clear without provoking too strong a backlash. He was thinking about how to say it.)

Some people are naturally solitary... but most people have a need for lasting, intimate relationships.

Some people are born liking to be alone, and living alone makes them feel very happy. But most people still like close, sustained intimate relationships. This provides a psychic and social framework for personal growth and development.

Then he continued:

On the one hand, people cry to the heavens: I love my fellow man; and on the other hand, they do not form deep, lasting relationships with others.

The meaning of this passage -- I think some of the words may have been mistyped or mistranslated. What he really means is: on the one hand, people say "I love my fellow man" -- why would you love your country? It is because you love your fellow citizens. What is a country? A country is made up of people, and you love the country because you love these people. But you say you love your fellow citizens, and no one is allowed to bully our fellow citizens, and so that our fellow citizens will not be bullied, I can shed my blood and sacrifice my life -- these are slogans people often shout. But Seth says, in your actual life, you do not form any deep, lasting relationships with the people around you. If you observe carefully, apart from shouting that you love your fellow citizens, how many people around you do you have deep feelings for? You cannot even shed your blood for the people around you, so how can you shed your blood for a virtual, generalized group of people? Is that not ridiculous? You cannot even find a few people around you with whom you have deep bonds, so how can you be so deeply affectionate toward all the people of an entire country?

It is easy to proclaim equal love for all humanity.

Many people say without thinking, "I love all humanity," "I love the people of a certain country." Proclaiming is easy. But what is love itself? Love itself is a kind of understanding, and its premise is understanding. If you do not even understand a person, how can you love them? On our level of activity, it is built upon the experience of intimate relationships. A person you have never met, never seen, never had any contact with -- you say "I really, really love them" -- how is that possible? Unless you have diluted the definition of love to the point of unconsciousness, to the point where it has no meaning at all, then you can say "I love everyone" -- because what love means to you no longer matters; it has been diluted to the thinness of air.

Since Seth is discussing the nature of the psyche and the nature of the soul, he will inevitably hit the nail on the head, without any beating around the bush. When we strip away all external appearances, strip away the fig leaf of gender, social ethics, and morality, and lay everything bare down to the bottom layer, as Seth describes, he points directly at the essence of the problem. This may not be easy for some people to accept.

So to love a person, you must appreciate the ways in which that person differs from you and from others.

You love a person certainly because this person is different from others. Or this person, when together with you, shows a state that is different from how they are with others -- one state with others, another state with you. What you love is this state and this feeling they have when they are with you, and what you love even more is your own feeling when you are with them. If you were like this with everyone, then how could you talk about loving this person and not that person?

You must hold that person in your mind; they must dwell in your heart. So to some extent, love is a kind of meditation, a loving focus upon another person.

Meditation is focus, focus upon a certain subject. Your focus upon a person is a loving focus, so to some extent love is a kind of meditation. It is like "in the eyes of a lover, the beloved is a beauty" -- why do you see them as a beauty? Because you focus only on their goodness, and this focus becomes a kind of self-hypnosis.

Once you have experienced that kind of love, you can translate it into other areas.

You must first experience that kind of love before you can transfer this love to other places. If you have never loved a single person, and you say you love all people, that is impossible. You must first have this experience of love, and then transfer this ability to focus lovingly upon one person to other places, and love spreads outward, expanding the extension and connotation of love. Then you can see other people in the radiance of this love -- from loving yourself, to loving the intimate people around you, and only then can you extend from yourself to others and love all people. Without this layer of relationship, any talk of love is nonsense.

Love is naturally creative and exploratory... you will explore all aspects of it, and even those characteristics that might otherwise appear as flaws will acquire a dear significance.

Since you love, you will creatively explore all aspects of the beloved. When you love a person, even their flaws seem wonderful to you, with a special, dear significance. Flaws are accepted; they are certainly seen, but they do not create any distinction -- because these are all attributes of the beloved, part of the person you love. Even those places that seem like blemishes are made up for before your eyes, becoming not so bad after all.

The beloved acquires an importance that surpasses all other people.

The beloved becomes more important than all other people, so we say "I love one person more than everything" -- because they surpass all people. This is a characteristic of love.

The love of a god, the range of its spread, can therefore equally accommodate the existence of all individuals within its vision, seeing each person and all their peculiarities, characteristics, and tendencies in countless glances of love.

The love of a god is different from human love; its range of spread is far broader than human love. In the vision of a god, all people's existence can be equally accommodated, and in infinite glances of love, each person and the peculiarities, characteristics, and tendencies of each person can be seen. A god can see the differences of each person, and what he loves is this difference.

This is not a love that generalizes everything... not a vague glance.

The love of a god is not the kind of general love for all things that you imagine. It is not looking down and being unable to distinguish tens of thousands of people, saying "I love you all" -- that is shouting slogans; he cannot even tell who is who. The love of a god is not like that. A god can measure the unique characteristics of each individual and love the characteristics of each person.

He does not dissolve individuality into formlessness... such love is indeed based upon complete understanding of each person.

It is not that each person's individuality becomes unimportant and dissolves into formlessness within the group. The love of a god is based upon each person's individuality and uniqueness, based upon complete understanding of each person. But your love for an entire country, for all the people of an entire country, is based upon a vague, generalized, blanket love without understanding them.

The emotion of love brings you to the closest understanding of the nature of All That Is.

This feeling and cognition of love can bring you to the closest understanding of the nature of All That Is.

Love causes devotion, commitment; love specifies. Therefore, if you do not love another, you cannot honestly insist that you love humanity and all beings equally. If you do not love yourself, it is difficult to love others.

Love causes devotion and commitment, and it invests itself specifically. So if you do not love the people around you, you cannot equally love all other humanity; if you do not even love yourself, it is also very difficult to love others.

Not all love is sexually oriented... yet love naturally seeks expression, and one of these expressions is through sexual activity.

This passage requires understanding the dialectical relationship between them: not all love is sexually oriented, but love naturally seeks expression -- if you do not express it, how can you show your love? And one of these expressions -- remember, one of them -- is through sexual activity. So if a girl loves a boy, she is willing to go to bed with him; this is a natural thing. All those pickup artist tricks and PUA methods nowadays are nonsense -- first of all, the girl has to like you and love you; otherwise those methods are useless. Seth tells you that one of the expressions of love is through sexual activity, but not all love is sexually oriented. These two are in a dialectical relationship.

However, when love and sex are artificially separated, or considered to be opposed to each other, then all kinds of problems arise.

When humans consider sex and love to be separate, or even antagonistic, all kinds of problems arise. When sex and love are separated, one of the most natural channels of expression for love is closed off, and lasting relationships become extremely difficult to establish; love often becomes extremely difficult to express. If two people have no sexual activity at all, the relationship is very hard to sustain, because the most natural way for love to express itself has been closed off by you.

I have talked about this example before, regarding Tsai Chin's ten-year sexless marriage²⁶ -- you can search for it and find it easily; it is very lamentable, a typical example.

Many children show the greatest love for toys, dolls, and imaginary playmates.

Many children pour all their love into their favorite toys and dolls. Why? Because many models in life restrict their other expressions, and their love can only be expressed on dolls. Through this process of projecting love onto dolls and identifying with dolls, their feelings toward their parents become ambiguous. A child's love should originally be given more to the parents, but the parents restrict their love. For example, if a girl always says she loves her father, or a boy grows up always saying he loves his mother, this is very strange and ambiguous. So they have no choice but to place these emotions onto toys.

Nowadays you see many girls who are quite grown up still playing with toys -- girls in their twenties still play with teddy bears. Why? You can think about why. Many boys pour all their energy into games. Do they really love games that much? If there were someone in real life they could love, would that not be better? Why invest in that instead? Because there is no choice; they are restricted, their energy has nowhere to dissipate, their love has nowhere to be expressed, and it can only be expressed on the toys around them.

Love, sex, play, curiosity, and exploratory characteristics come together in a natural way in children.

All these things are concentrated in children. So when you look at a child's problems, all these issues must be taken into account. But among our current early childhood educators, how many consider a child's love and sex in their education? How many truly pay attention to a child's curiosity and exploratory nature? Do we really take care of these aspects of a child's characteristics during early childhood education? Or which ones have we stifled? We only need to reflect on ourselves to know.

Yet the child soon learns that the range of his exploration is limited... even exploration of his own body is limited.

As the child gradually grows up, what does he learn? His range of exploration is limited; he cannot explore freely, and even exploring his own body is limited. Parents tell him which parts he cannot touch casually; from a young age, he is taught that he cannot freely touch his own body. He does not even have the right to touch his own body -- parents tell him this cannot be touched and that cannot be touched. Therefore, the child feels that any love expressed in an unofficial way is his own fault. The parents' stopping and scolding of the child has a great impact on the child; he feels that he loved wrongly, that it was not right, that touching a certain part of his own body was extremely wrong.

Thus, the concept of love and its expression become extremely distorted, already distorted during childhood.

For example, you do not go to war for the brotherhood of man.

You would not go to war for the brotherhood of humanity as a whole, because you have no love for them. If what you were familiar with was undistorted love, you would find this idea impossible -- you do not love them, it is that simple. Then why can a person go to war for his country? Because from childhood a person has been brainwashed, taught "you should love your country," and from childhood he has already given his love to the country or to slogans.

A man who begins with the feminine side of his nature cannot be expected to love women.

This point is very interesting. Everyone's nature has a bisexual aspect; within the male there is a feminine side. If a boy is ashamed from childhood of the feminine side of his human nature, when he grows up he cannot truly love a woman, because he himself does not even accept the feminine side of his own human nature. Conversely, in women they see that feminine side of their own reality -- the side that is despised, feared, yet full of emotion and emotional burdens. Their behavior in relationships between the sexes is expressed accordingly.

All he sees is the "bad" side of the feminine: fragile, weak, overly emotional, ready to die for love, dependent on men -- none of which he accepts. He thinks he is a real man, so how could he be ready to die for love? Women are so troublesome; their lifelong pursuit is just to find someone who loves them and live out their lives with that person -- what great ambition is there in that? Such women are too lowly. That is what he thinks in his heart. He does not accept this feminine emotional side of himself, and the women he sees in reality are all like this too, which in turn further reinforces his refusal to accept this feminine side of himself. Can such a man truly love a woman? He sees only the bad points in women, and he even denies the feminine part of himself -- how can he love a woman?

Women who are taught by society to fear the masculine in their nature cannot be expected to love men.

Conversely, some women fear the masculine component in their own nature -- rationality, calmness, lack of emotion, these are all labels of the masculine. Many women dislike the masculine part of their own character. How can such a woman truly love a man in life? All she sees are men's shortcomings. Any action by a man will be interpreted by her as: men do not understand emotion, do not understand romance, are not romantic enough, love me only with a purpose, everything is worked out through rational and logical analysis. She brings all her prejudices about men into her intimate relationships -- how can she truly love this man?

The so-called war between the sexes originates in this kind of division that you impose upon your own nature.

The conflict between men and women has its root in our division of the masculine and feminine parts of our own nature. We acknowledge only the part that matches our physical sex, and suppress and deny the other part. This leads you to deny the other sex in your reality as well -- you have already denied a part of your own nature, so you will deny the other sex in reality even more. Thus the two sexes stand opposed to each other, creating that kind of war.

The reality of the psyche, that is, the nature of spirituality, transcends such misunderstandings... The native language of the spirit often escapes you, but it is closely connected with what can roughly be called the language of love.

The nature of spirituality has no distinction of sex. Its own language escapes you, because you have not failed to grasp this spiritual language -- it is closely connected with what we may call the language of love. If you can hear or listen to the language of your own inner spirit, it will transcend sex, and it is a true love. This is why it can be called the language of love, and the next chapter will explain what the language of love is.

---

注释与核实

1. Source: Nature Human Behaviour, "Intergenerational persistence of poverty in five high-income countries" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02029-w) ↩

2. Source: Pew Research Center, "Polygamy is rare around the world, and mostly confined to a few regions" (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/12/07/polygamy-is-rare-around-the-world-and-mostly-confined-to-a-few-regions/) ↩

3. Source: Wikipedia, "Concubinage in China" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concubinage_in_China) ↩

4. Source: Our World in Data, "Life Expectancy" (https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy) ↩

5. This claim could not be verified. ↩

6. Source: Wikipedia, "Four Buddhist Persecutions in China" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Buddhist_Persecutions_in_China) ↩

7. This claim could not be verified. ↩

8. According to Mike's original words, "the main thread of ancient Greek mythology is about the war between humans and gods"; upon verification, it should be "the main thread of ancient Greek mythology is not the war between humans and gods, but the origin of the cosmos and the succession of divine generations—the transfer of sovereignty from Uranus to Cronus to Zeus, and the struggles between the Titans and the Olympian gods, culminating in Zeus establishing supreme rule; the relationship between mortals and gods is mainly reflected in the gods' punishment of human hubris, rather than warfare between humans and gods." (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Greek mythology: Types of myths in Greek culture," https://www.britannica.com/topic/Greek-mythology/Forms-of-myth-in-Greek-culture) ↩

9. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Fu Xi," "Nu Gua" (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fu-Xi) ↩

10. Source: Wikipedia, "Nüwa" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCwa) ↩

11. Source: Wikipedia, "History of the discovery of special relativity" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E7%8B%AD%E4%B9%89%E7%9B%B8%E5%AF%B9%E8%AE%BA%E5%8F%91%E7%8E%B0%E5%8F%B2) ↩

12. Source: Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, "Einstein at the patent office" (https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/the-history-of-the-ipi/einstein/einstein-at-the-patent-office) ↩

13. According to Mike's original words, "every night he chatted idly with a group of friends in his room, and what they talked about was not scientific matters, but all philosophical matters"; upon verification, it should be "from 1902 onward, Einstein, together with Solovine and Habicht, formed the 'Olympia Academy' in Bern, often gathering all night in Einstein's apartment, but the content was not only philosophy—they discussed philosophy and physics, and the books they read included Mach's The Science of Mechanics, Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis, Pearson's The Grammar of Science, as well as philosophical works by Hume, Spinoza, Mill, and others." (Source: Wikipedia, "Olympia Academy," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_Academy) ↩

14. Source: University of St Andrews, MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, "Niels Henrik David Bohr, Hon.F.R.S.E. - RSE Obituary" (https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Obituaries/Bohr_Niels_RSE_Obituary/) ↩

15. According to Mike's original words, "a makeup artist and image consultant named Jimi"; upon verification, it should be "this makeup artist and image designer is named 'Jimi' (not 'Jimi' as in 'secret'), a well-known image designer and stylist in mainland China, who entered the industry in 1996 and founded the Jimi Image Design School in Beijing in 2000." (Source: Wikipedia, "Jimi (stylist)," https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E5%90%89%E7%B1%B3_(%E9%80%A0%E5%9E%8B%E5%B8%88)) ↩

16. According to Mike's original words, "whether it is Zhao Zhi, Armani, or other big-name, more famous designers, it seems that if they don't say they are gay, they are embarrassed to mix in this circle"; upon verification, it should be "'Giorgio Armani' is one person, one designer, not two; and he never claimed to be gay—he was extremely private during his lifetime, only saying in a Vanity Fair interview that he had had romantic relationships with both men and women, and his long-term partner was Sergio Galeotti, his business partner who died of AIDS complications in 1985." (Source: Wikipedia, "Giorgio Armani," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Armani) ↩

17. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Auld Lang Syne" (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Auld-Lang-Syne) ↩

18. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Decameron" (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Decameron) ↩

19. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Decameron" (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Decameron) ↩

20. Source: CBS News New York, "Archdiocese of New York offers $800 million sex abuse settlement, lawyers say" (https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/archdiocese-new-york-800-million-sex-abuse-settlement/) ↩

21. Source: CNN, "Jean-Pierre Ricard: France opens investigation into Catholic cardinal that admitted to sexually abusing 14-year-old girl" (2022) (https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/08/europe/french-cardinal-sexual-abuse-intl/index.html) ↩

22. Source: Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 3 (https://archive.org/details/conversationswit0003wals) ↩

23. This claim could not be verified. ↩

24. Source: New York State Office of the Attorney General, "Attorney General James Takes Action Against Catholic Diocese of Buffalo for Failing to Protect Children" (2020) (https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2020/attorney-general-james-takes-action-against-catholic-diocese-buffalo-failing) ↩

25. According to Mike's original words, "there is an entertainment venue in Shanghai called White Horse Nightclub"; upon verification, it should be "this venue does exist in Shanghai, but its official name is 'White Horse Club' (English: Perfect Space), located on the 23rd floor of the Wangwang Building at 688 Shimen First Road in Jing'an District, a private club that only admitted female patrons and whose staff were all male; it was shut down by the Nanjing West Road Police Station of the Jing'an Branch of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau on January 25, 2019, and it was not called 'White Horse Nightclub.'" (Source: Wikipedia, "White Horse Club," https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%99%BD%E9%A9%AC%E4%BC%9A%E6%89%80) ↩

26. Source: Wikipedia, "Edward Yang" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E6%A5%8A%E5%BE%B7%E6%98%8C) ↩