A feminine presence

Thursday July 8, 2021

1:45 a.m. Turning to advantage a slight physical uneasiness. It may be the stillness and high humidity – a side-effect of life without air conditioning. As usual, easier to function sitting up than lying down, and anyway I am awake. In our ILC meeting yesterday, we decided that we would each try to contact a feminine presence, so I might as well begin today. In all the years I’ve been doing this, the only distinctively feminine voice I have encountered was Rita’s, and that was special because of course she and I had been closely associated in 3D life for eight years. But other than Rita, every other named source I have contacted has been masculine or – usually – undefined even as individual, let alone as masculine or feminine presence.

If you will –

Yes. Thanks. Please, proceed.

Gender is not what it appears to be while you are in 3D. That is, just as we flow through your neural patterns and come forth using your language, your cultural assumptions, your view of the world as our background assumptions, so we “pretend,” you might say, to be more 3D-individual than we are, and thus more masculine or feminine than we are.

By which, I presume, you mean that our larger selves being such a mixture of traits, and various “past lives” being each such a mixture, and, together, even more a mixture when considered together, assigning gender to the result is arbitrary.

Not arbitrary, exactly, but not accurate. As usual the inaccuracy comes mostly as a result of truncation of a phenomenon.

Shorn of context, a thing may appear clearer, but only because we are sort of ignoring contrary evidence.

It is a problem that can never be entirely avoided or overcome, which is one reason why accounts differ by perceiver. However [and here I suddenly perceive a change in “voice,” though really it is a change in energetic feel] perhaps this will help.

We’re glad for any clarity you can facilitate. First question, how are you doing whatever you are doing, to produce a sudden “feminine” feel?

It is more a withdrawing of contradictory characteristics than a putting-forward of ourselves or any aspect of ourselves.

I may have fumbled that. Go ahead unless and until I can help the process by questions or comments.

In 3D-limited circumstances, you all choose what you express, only you do it more unconsciously than we do it here. The difference is chiefly in 3D biology. Your chemical signaling systems determine your view of yourself at a level far prior to consciousness. That is, it is decided by filtering at a pre-rational basis.

Thus, no matter what your 3D body expresses per se, mentally and emotionally you may or may not feel identity – well, you express it.

I think you are meaning, people are born straight or gay or bi or whatever, and this is not a conscious choice but it is not exactly a biological choice either, but is a pre-conscious choice, not very accessible to conscious control or even awareness of the process.

Yes, that expresses it. Everybody includes everything, of course. It is far too late in human biological history for editing out into entirely male or entirely female characteristics in anyone, even if it were desirable. But the mixture that expresses is determined not at a conscious level but at an elementary pre-conscious level. Life may then offer choices as to what to consciously express, but the mixture per se is not under conscious control, nor was it consciously determined.

Now, I realize you are going to think, “She’s lost track of the fact that we weren’t asking about human sexuality; we wanted contact with feminine presences from the non-3D.” But – particularly via Frank! – how could we silently go along with mistaken assumptions? Much better to correct the assumptions first, and only then go about the task. Because, you see, if you in 3D are mixtures, even within the limits of your individual biology, how can you expect that we in non-3D will be any less mixtures, given that we do not have the drag of physical endocrines, etc.? Rita came with Rita’s voice, but she might as easily come to someone else with other aspects of the personality of which she is only one part, and perhaps they would experience her as someone masculine.

As Jane Roberts experienced herself as Jane but Seth experienced her as part of a larger being he knew as Rubert.

Yes. Don’t’ let yourselves go too far backward in the direction of seeing past lives as more separate than they are, but still it is an appropriate analogy. In 3D you are a mixture of “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics, and how these express, and to what extent, is, as we say, largely a matter determined at a pre-conscious level. In non-3D the variety of aspects, and the role of choice, is greater, and at the same time less important.

I’m getting that you are saying even the things we regard as masculine and feminine are less real than we suppose.

The division is less real, yes. The arbitrary assignment is less real. You mentioned “women’s intuition” as a way society used to characterize it. today it is going on a hundred years since intuition was redefined as the opposite end of a polarity from thinking. In other words, both are human abilities, human characteristics, human modes of perception, not primarily feminine or primarily masculine. In any given society, it might manifest in an unbalanced way, but that speaks to the nature of the society, not to the nature of intuition itself.

Extend the argument, as you will see that it extends about as far as you care to take it. There are no hard and fast divisions in reality, as you have been repeatedly reminded.

So the question was asked, Why do we usually experience non-3D personages as masculine? Is this cultural bias?

Nobody is going to like this answer, but it isn’t cultural bias, but personal bias.

Come again?

It is easy to blame “society” for one’s own biases, and it isn’t even a mistake to do so in a sense, because after all you are children of the society you were born into. But looking at Society as if it were a disconnected thing Out There, rather than remembering that it is a shared subjectivity that you cannot help identify with even if you rebel against it –

Huh. It’s a way of fighting our own internal civil war?

Not necessarily that dramatic, but certainly many a person has ignored or resisted or remained unconscious of internal contradictions by projecting them onto Society.

I don’t know that this is going to persuade anybody that what we see as cultural is in fact personal.

That’s because – again – you are confusing categories. If you think personal can be hermetically sealed off from impersonal, that’s saying “The shared subjectivity affects me, but I don’t affect it. I am a victim, here.” But the fact is, if you remember that the shared subjectivity cannot affect you in any random way, you have to then remember (or realize for the first time, perhaps) that anything you want to put off on “Society” or “The times” is really, by definition, an unknown part of you. Not as an abstract, not as an wooly-minded generalization, but as fact.

If you wish us to pretend that gossamer threads are in fact iron chains, well, we won’t get very far, will we?

So if a strong feminist nevertheless receives voices as masculine rather than as feminine, it means what?

It means whatever it means as an interaction between that 3D person and its part of the shared subjectivity. Don’t go trying to come up with universal laws if you can help it. “As above, so below” is universal enough.

So it is. Well, you said nobody would like the answer and I guess we’ll see. But thank you for it. By the way, as a point of interest, it occurs to me that there was that momentary feminine feeling – which I am now inclined to associate with the name Katherine – and then it faded away almost entirely, and pretty quickly, so that the “feel” of the incoming material was as gender-neutral as usual.

We will add that one word, then. What some are calling masculine is closer to gender-neutral, because in your society – which means, in your psyches which pull this from the shared subjectivity by resonance – “feminine” requires something added. Without that addition, the voice is usually thought to be “masculine.” You will notice, Frank, you never thought about whether we are masculine or feminine until you were questioned on it.

It’s true. I remember Rita asking me once why the past lives I was coming up with were all male. In fact they weren’t all male, but overwhelmingly so. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. What I do know is that there’s no point trying to be in fashion rather than going with whatever comes.

In any case, that’s our hour, unless there’s more you want to say.

No.

Okay, our special thinks for this.