A Psychic Manifesto ~ Jane Roberts

"A Psychic Manifesto" My life is its own definition. So is yours. Let us leave the priests to their hells and heavens, and confine the scientists to their dying universe and accidentally created stars. Let us each dare to open our dream's door, and explore the unofficial thresholds, where we begin. Let us refuse to be defined as sinful selves or creatures of a blighted species, and instead dare to recognize within our dreaming hides the grace of mental animals, in which soul and flesh are intermixed with a natural alchemy; so that awake, we dream, and dreaming, wake, straddling life and death alike, with an inner knowledge that confounds the dreary ministers and scientists. The flesh needs no absolution. Its cells are innocent as gods, whose hidden divine multiplications compute our smallest acts. How many eons did it take for our cells to learn arithmetic, since they are microscopic structures, minus brains, and science would say, lacking wit or consciousness? How did they learn to construct images of bone and blood, choosing just the proper combinations that add up to you and me? I've yet to decipher a fraction of my body's knowledge, though its molecular mathematics allows me to write this line. These thoughts journey through my brain by ancient pathways that I cannot claim, as if my body's memories predate its own time, rising from miniature civilizations, whose coded arts set my life in motion and are expressed through who I am. The facts of life are the heart's events, that persist beyond measurements. The heart deals with dream equations that would dazzle a computer; for the dreamer's laboratory has no walls, and his experiments combine time and space with a spontaneous knack that defies all formulas. If hearts had to hold back their beating, until science proved that life had meaning, then we'd have no life at all. But the heart beats predictably, giving its own evidence of a life experiment no technology can duplicate; and each beat comes like the first- singular, mysterious, from sources outside the grasp of objective processes. Each birth is unofficial, maverick, rising alike from strands of love to ancient vanished relatives, and tied to a future, unknown self who beckons the dream-eyed fetus on into life's bright scheme, bravely daring unknown passageways that lead to life's threshold, carrying conscious cargo from one universe to another. You made that journey. So did I. All that we are was once wrapped in a tissue parchment, and coiled like onion skin, imprinted with life's hieroglyphics. Fingers and toes were smaller than decimals, yet alive. And brains-to-be, measuring less than an inch, each contained all the ingredients we'd need, to think these thoughts. What perfect transistors, growing their own future parts! How were they wired when, as science says, we're only a combination of dumb elements, come alive in a universe formed by chance? Some chance, that my hands didn't keep growing more and more fingers, but stopped at ten, learning to count before I did; and that my neck knew where my head should be before my eyes could even read a book of anatomy. So let us dismiss all modern or ancient myths that tell us that our genes are flawed by primal lust, or worse, cursed by a revengeful god; so that the flesh is filled with sin's contents, overflowing with iniquity; or that we are natural killers- animals run amok, caught between our own jealous genes and the uncaring stars, a schizophrenic species, whose most magnificent acts are stamped with the mark of Cain Let us look instead to our direct experience, and listen to the messages that arise in unofficial ways, bypassing dictums and theologies. Let us begin by trusting once again the personal contact of self with self, and self with world. Let us observe the facts of heart and mind alike, and refuse to accept any theories that deny our own experience. My life is its own definition. So is yours. Our consciousness is self-evident. Are dreams not facts, when each and every nighttime skull is filled to its nocturnal brim with a commotion of images to be found there, and nowhere else isolated from the world like a master experiment? But no one watches or makes notes. Then let us collect our own dream species, wander among vast unexplored dream elements, and discover for ourselves those inner worlds where mind and will are born and merge, and descend from dreams' wild hilltops. I have opened time's window not just once, but often, catching just a glance of tomorrow's evidence before it was due; and so have many others, surprising some hour before its time. And just one such clue is enough to shatter all philosophies that say we're stuck like flies in a jar of time. So let us forsake our ancient documents and communes. Leave the statues of the gods to their plaster-of-paris parks, and let the scientists count invisible particles, hypnotizing themselves away. Let us run from doom's prophets, whatever names they bear, and let them sputter of catastrophes alone- waiting the world's end (huddled, the survivors-to-be wait in the worried air). But hold the world to your mind's ear, and hear the victorious roar of life's waves splashing against the shores of mind and sense; bursting tumultuously from sources echoed in our dreams, as the images of our desires leap into the swell of space and time. Jane Roberts "The God of Jane"