Jane Roberts on Mind

"Human consciousness was inherent and latent from the beginning of your physical universe."

"When I think of me as a psychic, I get hung up because I seem to be in the company of so many nuts. Writers may be as nuts as anyone else but it's a nuttiness that doesn't bug me -- there's no dogma attached."

"The overly specific sexual orientation, then, reflects a basic division in consciousness. It not only separates a man from his own intuitions and emotions to some extent, or a woman from her own intellect, but it effectively provides a civilization in which mind and heart, fact and revelation, appear completely divorced. To some degree each person is at war with the psyche, for all of an individual’s human characteristics must be denied unless they fit in with those considered normal to the sexual identity."

"Thoughts of such magnificent vigor began to think their own thoughts-and their thoughts thought thoughts. As if in divine astonishment and surprise, All That Is began to listen, and began to respond to these generations of thoughts and dreams, for the thoughts and dreams related to each other also."

"The consciousness of being human was fully developed in the cave man, of course, but the human conception was alive in the fish. We have spoken of mental genes. These are more or less psychic blueprints for physical matter, and in these mental genes existed the pattern for your type of self-consciousness."

"It doesn't matter," WisestFrog answered. "You knew that the thoughts were beneath you and you felt small. And here in the Land of the Gods, everything is so creative that your thoughts may give results you don't expect at all. But you really have no problem. Just think big yourself bigger. Go ahead, think a big thought."

"It might help if you imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniature psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know. Simply put, you do exactly this. Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another each of these is materialized into physical reality."

"In a fashion, at least in your time, science has as much as religion to fear from the free intellect as religion does. And any strong combination of intellectual and intuitional abilities is not tailor-made to bring you great friends from either category. Science has, unfortunately, bound up the minds of its own most original thinkers, for they dare not stray from certain scientific principles."

"You do not understand the dimensions into which your own thoughts drop, for they continue their own existence, and others look up to them and view them like stars. I am telling you that your own thoughts and mental actions appear to inhabitants of other systems like the stars and planets within your own; and those inhabitants do not perceive what lies within and behind the stars in their own heavens."

"You are not a miniature self, an adjunct to some superbeing, never to share fully In its reality. In those terms you are that superself - looking out of only one eye, or using just one finger. Much of this is very difficult to verbalize. You are not subordinate to some giant consciousness. While you think in such terms, however, I must speak of reincarnational selves counterparts, because you are afraid that if you climb out of what you think your identity is, then you will lose it."

"So I had to face the fact that I was blessed with abilities that were considered symptoms of emotional abnormality or mental derangement by psychology, often thought of as demonic by religion, and whose very existence was denied altogether by science. So in my darker moments I used to think that my psychic initiation and subsequent experiences were a mixed bag, to say the least. But the fact is that I was very sensitive to criticism for the very good reason that often I shared many of the beliefs that stimulated it."

"Cordellas are invisible symbols that surface. As they do, they show the universe in a new light by the very nature of their relationships. In a very limited fashion, alphabets do the same thing, for once you have accepted certain basic verbal symbols they impose their discipline even upon your thoughts . . . and throw their particular light upon the reality you perceive. Alphabets are nevertheless tools that shape and direct perception. They are groups of relationships that you transpose upon "reality". To this extent they shape your conceptions of the world that you know. Their discipline and rigidity is considerable. Once you think of a "tree" as a tree, it takes great effort before you can see it freshly again, as a living individual entity. Cordellas do not have the same rigidity. Inner invisible relationships are allowed to rise, the acknowledgment recognized reality viewed through the lenses of these emerging relationships."

"Everything was giant-sized, as if I were looking through binoculars. "I" was walking up giant stalks. At first I didn't know what they were or what I was, for that matter. The stalks were tall as redwood trees, and suddenly "I" realized that I was an insect of some kind. This was a grass blade. I thought I was a fly in a gigantic forest -- a giant fly, because everything was so large and super-real, and I'm used to thinking of flies as small. But I was an ordinary fly. I realized, and this was what the world looked like! Oddly enough, this made me feel better, I didn't care what I was; as long as I was something. So I felt myself go up the grass blade. It's impossible to verbalize the sensations I had, but I remember being aware of the weight of my wings. They seemed very sturdy and reassuring."

"Some people think that we are stuck in physical reality like flies in flypaper or victims in quicksand, so that each motion we make only worsens our predicament and hastens our extinction. Others see the universe as a sort of theater into which we are thrust at birth and from which we depart forever at death. In the backs of their minds people with either attitude will see a built-in threat in each new day; even joy will be suspect because it, too, must end in the body's eventual death. I used to feel this way. When I fell in love with Rob, my joy served to double the underlying sense of tragedy I felt, as if death mocked me all the more by making life twice as precious. I saw each day bringing me closer to a total extinction that I could hardly imagine, but which I resented with growing vehemence."

"What really made me angry though was finding myself agreeing with any of the journal's articles, and I did agree with several. The writers had a keen, if cold intelligence. They did a great deal of seeing through some of the nonsense concerned with the psychic field in general. Of course, they were almost vengefully gleeful when they could legitimately knock down some psychic performance, or show a psychic's predictions to be wrong. Only why couldn't they see their own scientific nonsense? And why couldn't their trained intellects perceive their own emotional vehemence? Because, I thought unhappily, they were scientific witch hunters."

"As to the origin of life, any life, I thought, we remain ignorant. Our science theorizes about the beginning of the cosmos or the birth of life. Our religions postulate endless versions of a man-God, hardly more rational than we are, as the Creator. In the past I have sometimes thought that maybe life is meaningless after all. Then I'd think that maybe the Seth material is a kind of cosmic poppycock -- the chemical composition of my mind somehow intelligent enough to understand the irony of its own meaninglessness, then spinning desperate yarns, as many psychologists would say; futile fantasies leading nowhere. But then I'd think that a brain that could conceive or order somehow had to emerge from a greater order. Besides that, earlier I hadn't realized that science and religion had spun some pretty weird yarns themselves, and if poppycock was being measured on a scale of one to ten, in my book anyhow they'd each get a twelve and a gold star."

"I knew that the library was also the materialization of a certain level of the psyche, even as our world is. Only there, time is laid out like space is here. The windows of the library coincide with definite places in our space-time. In our world, these points of intersection may appear as natural objects, and these correlate with coordination points in your psyche. Moving toward these coordination points in your mind automatically lines up your consciousness to some extent with this other reality, and stabilizes conditions enough to allow for more or less conscious entry and return."