My Work And Those Dimensions Of Reality Into Which It Takes Me

I have friends even as you do, though my friends may be of longer standing.

We experience our own reality in quite a different manner than you do. We are aware of what you would call our past selves, those personalities we have adopted in various other existences.

Because we use telepathy, we can hide little from each other, even if we wished to.

This, I am sure, seems an invasion of privacy to you, and yet I assure you that even now none of your thoughts are hidden, but are known quite clearly to your family and friends - and I may add, unfortunately, to those you consider enemies as well. You are simply not aware of this fact.

This does not mean that each of us is like an open book to the other. Quite the contrary. There is such a thing as mental etiquette, mental manners. We are much more aware of our own thoughts than you are. We realize our freedom to choose our thoughts, and we choose them with some discrimination and finesse.

The power of our thoughts has been made clear to us, through trial and error in other existences. We have discovered that no one can escape the vast creativity of the mental image, or of emotion. This does not mean that we are not spontaneous, or that we must deliberate between one thought or another, in anxious concern that one might be negative or destructive. That, in your terms, is behind us.

Our psychological structure does mean that we can communicate in far more various forms than those with which you are familiar, however. Pretend, for example, that you meet a childhood friend whom you have long forgotten. Now you may have little in common. Yet you may have a fine afternoon’s discussion centered about old teachers and classmates, and establish a certain rapport.

So, when I “meet” another, I may be able to relate to him much better on the basis of a particular past life experience, even though in my “now” we have little in common. We may have known each other, for example, as entirely different people in the fourteenth century, and we may communicate very nicely by discussing those experiences, much as you and your hypothetical childhood friend established rapport by remembering your past.

We are aware that we are ourselves, however - the multidimensional personalities who shared a more or less common environment at one level of our existence. As you will see, this analogy is a rather simple one that will do only for now, because past, present, and future do not really exist in those terms.

Our experience, however, does not include the time divisions with which you are familiar. We have far more friends and associates than you do, simply because we are aware of varying connections in what we call for now “past” incarnations.

We have of course therefore more knowledge at our fingertips, so to speak. There is no period of time, in your terms, that you can mention, but some of us have been from there, and carry within our memories the indelible experience that was gained in that particular context.

We do not feel the need to hide our emotions or thoughts from others, because all of us by now well recognize the cooperative nature of all consciousness and reality, and our part in it. We are highly motivated. Could spirits be anything else?

Simply because we have at our command the full use of our energy, it is not diverted into conflicts. We do not fritter it away, but utilize it for those unique and individual purposes that are a basic part of our Psychological experience.

Now, each whole self, or multidimensional personality, has its own purposes, missions, and creative endeavors that are initial and basic parts of itself and that determine those qualities that make it eternally valid and eternally seeking. We are finally free to utilize our energy in those directions. We face many challenges of quite momentous nature, and we realize that our purposes are not only important in themselves, but for the surprising offshoots that develop in our efforts to pursue them. In working for our purposes, we realize we are blazing trails that can also be used by others.

We also suspect - certainly I do - that the purposes themselves will have surprising results, astounding consequences that we have never realized, and that they will merely lead to new avenues. Realizing this helps us keep a sense of humor.

When one has been bom and has died many times, expecting extinction with each death, and when this experience is followed by the realization that existence still continues, then a sense of the divine comedy enters in.

We are beginning to leam the creative joy of play. I believe, for example, that all creativity and consciousness is born in the quality of play, as opposed to work, in the quickened intuitional spontaneity that I see as a constant through all my own existences, and in the experience of those I know.

I communicate with your dimension, for example, not by willing myself to your level of reality, but by imagining myself there. All of my deaths would have been adventures had I realized what I know now. On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough.

We enjoy a sense of play that is highly spontaneous, and yet I suppose you would call it responsible play. Certainly it is creative play. We play, for example, with the mobility of our consciousness, seeing how “far” one can send it. We are constantly surprised at the products of our own consciousness, of the dimensions of reality through which we can hopscotch. It might seem that we use our consciousness idly in such play, and yet again, the pathways we make continue to exist and can be used by others. We leave messages to any who come by, mental signposts.

We can be highly motivated therefore, and yet use and understand the creative use of play, both as a method of attaining our goals and purposes and as a surprising and creative endeavor in itself.

Now, in my work as a teacher I travel into many dimensions of existence, even as a traveling professor might give lectures in various states or countries. Here, however, the resemblance ends, largely, since before I can begin to work I must set up preliminary psychological structures and learn to know my pupils before teaching can even begin.

I must have a thorough knowledge of the particular system of reality in which my pupil operates, of his or her system of thought, of the symbols that are meaningful. The stability of the pupil’s personality must be correctly gauged by me. The needs of that personality cannot be ignored but must be taken into consideration.

The pupil must be encouraged, but not overly extended while development continues. My material must be presented in such a way that it makes sense in the context in which the pupil understands reality, particularly in the early stages. Great care must be utilized, even before serious learning can begin, that all levels of the personality develop at a more or less constant rate.

Often the material I present will initially be given without any sign of my presence, seemingly as a startling revelation. For no matter how carefully I present the material, it is still bound to change past ideas that are strongly a part of the pupil’s personality. What I say is one thing, but the pupil of course is thrust into psychological and psychic behavior and experience that may seem quite alien to him on a conscious level.

The problems vary according to the system in which my pupil has his or her existence. In your system, for example, and in connection with the woman through whom I now write this book, initial contact on my part was made long before our sessions began.

The personality was never consciously aware of the initial meeting. She simply experienced sudden new thoughts, and since she is a poet, these appeared as poetic inspirations. At one time some years ago, at a writers’ conference, she became involved in circumstances that could have led to her psychic development before she was ready. The psychological climate at that time, of those involved, initiated the conditions, and without realizing what she was about our friend [Jane] went into a trance.

I had known of her psychic gifts since her childhood, but the insights necessary were channeled through the poetry until the personality attained the necessary background that was needed in this particular case. In the affair just mentioned, therefore, I was informed and saw to it that the episode ended and was not pursued.

It was hardly an accidental performance, however. Quite without knowing it, the personality decided to try its wings, figuratively speaking. As a part of my work, therefore, I have been coaching the young woman in one way or another since her childhood - and all of this as a preliminary to the serious work that began with our

This is a normal part of my activity in many levels of existence. It is highly diversified work, for the personality structures vary. While within the systems in which I work there are certain basic similarities, in some dimensions I would not be equipped to be a teacher simply because the basic concepts of experience would be alien to my nature, and the learning processes themselves outside of my own experience.

Now your ideas of space are highly erroneous. So in my contacts with your sphere of activity, I do not sweep through bright golden skies like some spiritual superman into your physical domain.

I will go into this in a later chapter, but in a very real manner, space as you perceive it simply does not exist. Not only is the illusion of space caused by your own physical perceptive mechanisms, but it is also caused by mental patterns that you have accepted

• patterns that are adopted by consciousness when it reaches a certain stage of “evolution” within your system.

When you arrive, or emerge, into physical life, not only is your mind not a blank slate, waiting for the scrolls that experience will write upon it, but you are already equipped with a memory bank far surpassing that of any computer. You face your first day upon the planet with skills and abilities already built in, though they may or may not be used; and they are not merely the result of heredity as you think of it.

You may think of your soul or entity - though only briefly and for the sake of this analogy - as some conscious and living, divinely inspired computer who programs its own existences and lifetimes. But this computer is so highly endowed with creativity that each of the various personalities it programs spring into consciousness and song, and in turn create realities that may have been undreamed of by the computer itself.

Each such personality, however, comes with a built-in idea of the reality in which it will operate, and its mental equipment is highly tailored to meet very specialized environments. It has full freedom, but it must operate within the context of existence to which it has been programmed. Within the personality, however, in the most secret recesses, is the condensed knowledge that resides in the computer as a whole. I must emphasize that I am not saying that the soul or entity is a computer, but only asking you to look at the matter in this light in order to make several points clear.

Each personality has within it the ability not only to gain a new type of existence in the environment - in your case in physical reality - but to add creatively to the very quality of its own consciousness, and in so doing to work its way through the specialized system, breaking the barriers of reality as it knows it.

Now, there is a purpose in all this that will also be discussed later. I mention this whole subject here, however, because I want you to see that your environment is not real in the terms that you imagine it to be. When you are born, then, you are already “conditioned” to perceive reality in a particular manner, and to interpret experience in a very limited but intense range.

I must explain this before I can clearly give you an idea of my environment, or of those other systems of reality in which I operate. There is no space between my environment and yours, for example, no physical boundaries that separate us. In a very real way, of speaking, your concept of reality as seen through your physical senses, scientific instruments, or arrived at through deduction, bears little resemblance to the facts - and the facts are difficult to explain.

Your planetary systems exist at once, simultaneously, both in time and in space. The universe that you seem to perceive, either visually or through instruments, appears to be composed of galaxies, stars, and planets, at various distances from you. Basically, however, this is an illusion. Your senses and your very existence as physical creatures program you to perceive the universe in such a way. The universe as you know it is your interpretation of events as they intrude upon your three-dimensional reality. The events are mental.

This does not mean that you cannot travel to other planets, for example, within that physical universe, any more than it means that you cannot use tables to hold books, glasses, and oranges, although the table has no solid qualities of its own.

When I enter your system, I move through a series of mental and psychic events. You would interpret these events as space and time, and so often I must use the terms, for I must use your language rather than my own.

Root assumptions are those built-in ideas of reality of which I spoke

those agreements upon which you base your ideas of existence. Space and time, for example, are root assumptions. Each system of reality has its own set of such agreements. When I communicate within your system, I must use and understand the root assumptions upon which it is based. As a teacher it is part of my job to understand and use these, and I have had existences in many such systems as a part of what you may call my basic training; though in your terms my associates and I had other names for them.

The entity, or the soul, has a far more creative and complicated nature than even your religions have ever granted it.

It utilizes numberless methods of perception, and it has at its command many other kinds of consciousness. Your idea of the soul is indeed limited by your three-dimensional concepts. The soul can change the focus of its consciousness, and uses consciousness as you use the eyes in your head. Now in my level of existence I am simply aware of the fact, strange as it may seem, that I am not my consciousness.

My consciousness is an attribute to be used by me. This applies to each of the readers of this book, even though the knowledge may be hidden. Soul or entity, then, is more than consciousness.

When I enter your environment, I turn my consciousness in your direction, therefore. In one way, I translate what I am into an event that you can understand to some extent. In a much more limited manner, any artist does the same thing when he translates what he is, or a portion of it, into a painting. There is at least an evocative analogy there.

When I enter your system, I intrude into three-dimensional reality, and you must interpret what happens in the light of your own root assumptions. Now whether or not you realize it, each of you intrudes into other systems of reality in your dream states without the full participation of your normally conscious self. In subjective experience you leave behind physical existence and act, at times, with strong purpose and creative validity within dreams that you forget the instant you awaken.

When you think of the purpose of your existence, you think in terms of daily waking life, but you also work at your purpose in these other dream dimensions, and you are then in communication with other portions of your own entity, at work at endeavors quite as valid as those you are about in waking life.

When I contact your reality, therefore, it is as if I were entering one of your dreams. I can be aware of myself as I dictate this book through Jane Roberts, and yet also be aware of myself in my own environment; for I send only a portion of myself here, as you perhaps send out a portion of your consciousness as you write a letter to a friend, and yet are aware of the room in which you sit. I send out much more than you do in a letter, for a portion of my consciousness is now within the entranced woman as I dictate, but the analogy is close enough.

My environment, as I mentioned earlier, is not one of a personality recently dead in your terms, but later I will describe what you can expect under those conditions. One large difference between your environment and mine is that you must physically materialize mental acts as physical matter. We understand the reality of mental acts and recognize their brilliant validity. We accept them for what they are, and therefore we are beyond the necessity to materialize them and interpret them in such a rigid manner.

Your earth was very dear to me. I can now turn the focus of my consciousness toward it, and if I choose, experience it as you do; but I can also perceive it in many ways that you cannot in your time.

Now some of you who read this book will immediately and intuitively grasp what I am saying, for you will have already suspected that you are viewing experience through highly distorted, though colorful, figurative lenses. Remember also that if physical reality is in a larger sense an illusion, it is an illusion caused by a greater reality. The illusion itself has a purpose and a meaning.

Perhaps it is better to say that physical reality is one form that reality takes. In your system, however, you are focused much more intensely upon one relatively small aspect of experience.

We can travel freely through varying numbers of such realities. Our experience at this point includes our work in each. I do not mean to minimize the importance of your present personalities, nor of physical existence. To the contrary.

Three-dimensional experience is an invaluable place of training. Your personality as you now know it will indeed persevere, and with its memories, but it is only a part of your entire identity, even as your childhood in this life is an extremely important part of your present personality, though now you are far more than a child.

You will continue to grow and develop, and you will become aware of other environments, even as you left your childhood home. But environments are not objective things, conglomerations of objects that exist independently of you. Instead you form them and they are quite literally extensions of yourself; materialized mental acts that extend outward from your consciousness.

I will tell you exactly how you form your environment. I form mine following the same rules, though you end up with physical objects and I do not.

Your scientists are finally learning what philosophers have known for centuries - that mind can influence matter. They still have to discover the fact that mind creates and forms matter.

Now your closest environment, physically speaking, is your body. It is not like some manikin-shape in which you are imprisoned, that exists apart from you like a casing.

Your body is not beautiful or ugly, healthy or deformed, swift or slow simply because this is the kind of body that was thrust upon you indiscriminately at birth. Instead your physical form, your corporeal personal environment, is the physical materialization of your own thoughts, emotions, and interpretations.

Quite literally, the “inner self’ forms the body by magically transforming thoughts and emotions into physical counterparts. You grow the body. Its condition perfectly mirrors your subjective state at any given time. Using atoms and molecules, you build your body, forming basic elements into a form that you call your own.

You are intuitively aware that you form your image, and that you are independent of it. You do not realize that you create your larger environment and the physical world as you know it by propelling your thoughts and emotions into matter - a breakthrough into three-dimensional life. The inner self, therefore, individually and en masse, sends its psychic energy out, forming tentacles that coalesce into form.

Each emotion and thought has its own electromagnetic reality, completely unique. It is highly equipped to combine with certain others, according to the various ranges of intensity that you may include. In a manner of speaking, three-dimensional objects are formed in somewhat the same way that the images you see on your television screen are formed, but with a large difference. And if you are not tuned into that particular frequency, you will not perceive the physical objects at all.

Each of you act as transformers, unconsciously, automatically transforming highly sophisticated electromagnetic units into physical objects. You are in the middle of a “matter-concentrated system,” surrounded, so to speak, by weaker areas in which what you would call “pseudomatter” persists. Each thought and emotion spontaneously exists as a simple or complex electromagnetic unit - unperceived, incidentally, as yet by your scientists.

The intensity determines both the strength and the permanency of the physical image into which the thought or emotion will be materialized. In my own material I am explaining this in depth. Here, I merely want you to understand that the world that you know is the reflection of an inner reality.

You are made basically of the same ingredients as a chair, a stone, a head of lettuce, a bird. In a gigantic cooperative endeavor, all consciousness joins together to make the forms that you perceive. Now, because this is known to us, we can change our environments and our own physical forms as we wish, and without confusion, for we perceive the reality that lies beneath.

We also realize that permanency of form is an illusion, since all consciousness must be in a state of change. We can be, in your terms, in several places at once because we realize the true mobility of consciousness. Now whenever you think emotionally of another person, you send out a counterpart of yourself, beneath the intensity of matter, but a definite form.

This form, projecting outward from your own consciousness, completely escapes your egotistical attention. When I think emotionally of someone else, I do the same thing, except that a portion of my consciousness is within the image, and can communicate.

Environments are primarily mental creations of consciousness thrust out into many forms. I have a fourteenth-century study, my favorite, with which I am very pleased, for example. In your physical terms it does not exist, and I know quite well it is my mental production.

Yet I enjoy it, and often take a physical form in order to sit at the desk and look out the window at the countryside.

Now you do the same thing when you sit in your living room, but you do not realize what you are doing; and presently you are somewhat restricted. When my associates and I meet, we often translate each other’s thoughts into various shapes and forms out of pure enjoyment in the practice. We have what you might call a game, demanding some expertise, where for our own amusement we see which of us can translate any given thought into the most numerous forms.

There are such subtle qualities affecting the nature of all thought, such emotional gradations, that no one is ever identical - and incidentally, no physical object in your system is an exact duplicate of any other. The atoms and molecules that compose it - any object - have their own identities that color and qualify any object that they form.

You accept and perceive and focus upon continuities and similarities as you perceive physical objects of any kind, and in a very important manner you shut out and ignore dissimilarities out of a given field of actuality. Therefore you are very highly discriminating, accepting certain qualities and ignoring others. Your bodies not only change completely every seven years, for example. They change constantly with each breath.

Within the flesh, atoms and molecules constantly die and are replaced. The hormones are in a constant state of motion and alteration. Electromagnetic properties of skin and cell continually leap and change, and even reverse themselves. The physical matter that composed your body a moment ago is different in important ways from the matter that forms your body in this instant.

If you perceived the constant change within your body with as much persistence as you attend to its seemingly permanent nature, then you would be amazed that you ever considered the body as one more or less constant, more or less cohesive, entity.

Even subjectively you focus upon and indeed manufacture the idea of a relatively stable, relatively permanent conscious self. You stress those ideas and thoughts and attitudes that you recall from “past” experience as your own, completely ignoring those that once were “characteristic” and now are vanished - ignoring the fact also that you cannot hold thought. The thought of a moment before, in your terms, vanishes away.

You try to maintain a constant, relatively permanent physical and subjective self in order to maintain a relatively constant, relatively permanent environment. So you are always in a position of ignoring such change. Those that you refuse to acknowledge are precisely those that would give you a much better understanding of the true nature of reality, individual subjectivity, and the physical environment that seems to surround you.

What happens to a thought when it leaves your conscious mind? It does not simply disappear. You can learn to follow it, but you are usually frightened of turning your attention away from its intense focus in three-dimensional existence.

Therefore, it seems that the thought disappears. It seems also that your subjectivity has a mysterious unknown quality about it, and that even your mental life has a sort of insidious dropping-off point, a subjective cliff over which thoughts and memories fall, to disappear into nothingness. Therefore to protect yourself, to protect your subjectivity from drifting, you erect various psychological barriers at what you suppose to be the danger points.

Instead, you see, you can follow these thoughts and emotions simply by realizing that your own reality continues in another direction, beside the one with which you mainly identify. For these thoughts and emotions that have left your conscious mind will lead you into other environments.

These subjective openings through which thoughts seem to disappear are in fact like psychic warps, connecting the self that you know with other universes of experience - realities where symbols come to life and thoughts are not denied their potential.

There is communication between these other realities and your own in your dream states, and a constant interaction between both systems. If there is any point where your own consciousness seems to elude you or escape you, or if there is any point where your consciousness seems to end, then these are the points where you have yourselves set up psychological and psychic barriers, and these are precisely those areas that you should explore. Otherwise you feel as if your consciousness is enclosed within your skull, immobile and constricted, and every lost thought or forgotten memory at least symbolically seems like a small death. And such is not the case.