Library » Conscious Creation » A Decentralized God and An American Vision by Jane Roberts
From The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto
Abridged by Joanne Helfrich
|
||
A Decentralized God by Jane Roberts (Abridged)
Jane wrote this chapter in October 1979, almost 22 years before the events of September 11, 2001, yet the work feels incredibly resonant with these times. I’ve summarized the beginning of the chapter in order to focus on the content identified (with added subtitle) as Jane’s “An American Vision.” - JH
Jane was completing The God of Jane when autumn was in the air—and word of a psychic fair. “In rather typical American fashion, I thought, they were taking their wares to the marketplace, displaying products out in the open, forsaking the old séance rooms and spooky cubbyholes for the bright malls at noon.” But the fair was almost canceled when “a group of local religious fundamentalists began an impassioned campaign to intimidate the merchants at the mall,” and when the fair was moved to a community spot, people there “were handed pamphlets proclaiming that the psychic readings were satanic, inspired by the devil to deceive people and steal souls away from God.” Soon afterward, another religious group held a rally in the local park to protest against homosexuals.
Jane says she found herself “thinking, ‘Thank God we have a constitution and separation of church and state’.” Her mind turned to public and national events as they were “related to religion and psychic activity. I could feel myself trying to make certain important connections that had so far escaped me.”
“At the same time something else made me consider the public or sociological implications of trance material—my own in particular.” Jane was reviewing Sue Watkins’ book, Conversations with Seth: The Story of Jane Roberts’s ESP Class, and found it “unsettling” to view the class, Seth, and herself from another person’s viewpoint. “It seemed certain that some interaction between public affairs and the events of my private life must have caused a particular kind of tension that generated my psychic intuition, and that that tension must happen only when certain types of persons encounter particular kinds of historical events,” citing her “concerns back in late 1963 when JFK had just been assassinated and there had been talk about a big showdown with Cuba. (Rob and I had stocked survival food, a rifle, and other supplies in a closet.) These national events made deep impression on our private lives. And surely the Seth sessions provide a new framework or platform from which we could consider what was going on in our own lives and in the world.”
“It was quite possible then, I thought, that when the problems of the species became too great for its framework of understanding a new psychological acceleration began in response to the tension, until one way or another we broke free to a larger context. And surely now was the time.
“We’d become exteriorized to an alarming degree, I mused, acting as if we were, indeed, science’s living machines: manufactured by some automatic, brilliant mechanics that ran itself without cause or reason—mindless survival machines. Or we acted as if we were a god’s sinful creatures, tainted with evil since birth. Our thoughts became so identified with exterior organizations that we’d invested them with parts of ourselves, then lost sight of those portions. We stopped asking the important questions for ourselves. Instead we turned over the questions to science or religion, and largely accepted their prepackaged answers and explanations.
“So no wonder, I thought, there were psychic fairs in village malls. No wonder historic heroes, wisemen, spacemen, and saints were all communicating through automatic writing or Ouija boards. No wonder there were new cults springing up everywhere. And no wonder that the prophets of doom were taking over the television screens and the ancient religions were trying a new revival The psychological acceleration had begun. The mass psyche was pushing at its boundaries, reaching, searching, using all of its energy to pull free. The old dogmas might blaze with new fire for a moment but the people were busy: in their own ways, they were again ready to approach the universe and their experience directly. What did it all mean, I wondered, and what were they—what were we—really up to?
“We were rediscovering our ancient tools of god-making, I thought; polishing those psychological skills that had grown rusty from disuse throughout many centuries. We were ready to come out from behind our dogmas and ceremonies, to encounter the universe through our own eyes and to try once again to push against our recognized boundaries. We might make errors again. We might even drag along dark vestiges from the past—gods and devils, martyrs, evil spirits and divine curses—but we were on the move again, and maybe one day we would shake off that pesty pack of superstitions.
Still, Jane felt she was “missing an important point that would pull all my ideas together,” until she was visited by three students who had been schooled in Europe. Talking with them, it occurred to her that “Europe is a place of ancient beliefs and authoritative doctrines” and that it was “no coincidence that I stated my work here, in this country. And when our country was founded it was a land for the do-it-yourselfers. Modern spiritualism started here, too, but it didn’t go far enough. Christianity itself came here from Europe, and we should have left it behind too. But we didn’t the new country needed a religion uniqely suited to a democracy; maybe religion isn’t the proper word: a vision. An authoritative, absolute God doesn’t fit a democracy any more than an absolute king or dictator would!”
“I also remembered several American writers from the past…Walt Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson. They were peculiarly American as thinkers with their stress upon individuality, mysticism, strength, expression, and responsibility. Darwin and Freud were both European, their theories tinged by ancient prejudices and pessimism. But mostly I remembered my own conflicts: for years I felt caught between the philosophies of T. S. Eliot and e. e. cummings, as expressed in their poetry….Eliot’s pessimism pervaded the arts and sciences, and it became fashionable to be bored with life. No one really paid much attention to e. e. cummings. His optimism went out of style. He was called simplistic, for caring.
“It hadn’t occurred to me before in just the same way that Eliot was so buried in European tradition—for although born and educated in America, he became a British subject. I just never thought much about it. But e. e. cummings had a vision of America, and no one listened. His vision was swallowed by Darwinism and Freudianism; and so was Whitman’s and Thoreau’s and Emerson’s.
“I felt a certain sorrow for those now rather unfashionable American writers, and it was during this period that I wrote the poem ‘e. e. cummings’ ghost’ that appears in the frontmatter of this book. At the same time I saw that my impulses had led me truly, from the God of Jane idea, through to my ‘Psychic Manifesto,’ to the realization that what we needed was a decentralized God; and I knew that my work for this particular book was finished.”
[ Go to the top ]
An American Vision by Jane Roberts
“Overall, then, I envision us as being part of an indivisible Godhead or Source to which we each give individual expression through the actions of our lives, but for which no one person or group or dogma or book can presume to speak in absolute terms. This Divinity or Ultimate Reality endows us with inner direction that’s provided, as Seth states, though our natural impulses. Those impulses are uniquely suited to bring about our individual fulfillments and accomplishments in a way that also benefits all life. This stress on impulses in no way denies the importance of the intellect, however. As a species, we are impulsively intellectual; we have the impulse to reason.
“We will, indeed, have quite different visions and versions of God, All That is, Ultimate Reality or whatever other term we may use to describe our unknown source, as we each interpret reality through our unique experiences and abilities. Such diversity should be taken for granted. But we should allow no one such vision to be accepted as absolute, or as carrying the indelible stamp of Divine approval.
“Since we are, apparently, natural god-makers, it’s about time that we begin to examine the psychic and psychological processes involved. Ultimately we form our entire civilizations around such beliefs. Obviously then, the processes themselves arouse the deepest levels of the psyche. The events of any religion become supercharged. The heady mixture of psychic and historic events fuses and henceforth cannot be separated.
“I think that the preliminary stages of such new explosive psychic rebirth are upon us now. People are looking for alternate explanations of reality. Growing numbers of them can see little sense either in Christianity’s or science’s version of the nature of man and his place in nature’s framework.
“Again: An authoritative absolute God doesn’t fit a democracy any more than a king or dictator would. How is it that we haven’t realized that before? True, our president must at least check with Congress before sending our people off to war. But the president’s authority has always been backed up by the certainty that God was on our side, and based on the assumption that war’s mass murders were justified if committed in the combined service of God and country.
“So, no more! The next time it’s shouted from national podiums that God is on our side, we have the right to ask, ‘Which God? Jesus? The Jesus who said ‘Blessed are the meek’ or the Jesus who cursed the fig tree? The God of the religious fundamentalists? Of the Jews? Which God?’ The gods of Jane and Rob and the gods of my readers are apt to be a bit more loving, certainly less terrible and less sure of themselves: Their messages are for private persons. And I’m convinced that in those terms, we do have individual gods; that the portion of the universe that formed us continues to do so, and that the universe and the selves that we are meet and intersect at those psychic levels where our own creativity begins. But we’ve been taught the opposite. We’ve been taught that as a species we’re cursed from antiquity, flawed by original sin or by science’s ‘selfish genes.’ No wonder we couldn’t trust ourselves and our lives. No wonder we’ve had such difficulties worldwide for as far back as history is recorded.
“Maybe the time is ripe for a change. We need a democracy of spirit, an end to divine hierarchies—and this country may well be the most auspicious place for such a rebirth. If Christianity’s authoritative God clashes with democratic ideals, the idea of a Divinity expressing itself equally through each citizen fits in quite well. In fact, that divine quality in man would provide the self-reliance and trust that would truly enable a people to govern themselves.
“Such a people would never give war a divine sanction, but would consider it a deplorable example of man’s own distorted beliefs about himself and the world; beliefs that do indeed pit one nation against the other. And such a people would no longer hook up the idea of individualism with Darwinian survival of the fittest doctrines that foster competition rather than cooperation.
“There is no doubt that we need to believe that life has meaning. That belief may well be a biological imperative. If we were as science maintains—only creatures formed by elements combining mindlessly in a universe itself created by chance, surrounded everywhere by chaos—then how could we even conceive of the idea of meaning or order?
“Science would say that the idea of meaning itself is simply a reflection of the state of the brain, as is the illusion of our consciousness. But a science that disregards consciousness must necessarily end up creating its own illusion. It ignores the reality of experience, the evidence of being, and in so doing it denies rather than reinforces life’s values.
“We need a division of scientific dogma from national policy-making so that those values not considered by science can be given some voice in issues involving public welfare. An authoritative God coupled with an aggressive science sanctioned by national policy could have disastrous results indeed.
“This Universal Divinity or Ultimate Reality or All That is wouldn’t be confined to one people or nation or species though, but would include all species of life. Each creature, each life whatever its degree would have its rights as an expression of that Source and as an inhabitant of Earth and contributor to planetary existence. Divinity. then would be dispersed throughout creation.
“I become more and more convinced that the mass psyche is preparing for another intuitive upthrust, and that within its vast ranges it does possess the solutions, visions, and wisdom that we need. That power is making itself felt in the private arena It’s expressed and personified in the psychic experience of large numbers of people. It speaks through the spacemen and saints and psychic heroes of automatic writings and Ouija board messages; even in the cults and the frenzied activities of the fundamentalists. The mass psyche is looking for a way out of official beliefs. It’s ready to form a more comprehensive vision.
“But we must stop automatically taking such information at face value, translating it automatically through ancient beliefs. We must look directly at our own experience again—and learn to trust it. We must be our own psychic naturalists, combining reason with intuition. We must refuse to let old theories define our realities for us, limiting and distorting the very scope of our lives.
“Instead, we must learn to acknowledge and interpret our own psychic perceptions; to distinguish between, say, psychic newscasts, documentaries, dramas, fantasies, and educational programs. We have to learn to read the language of the psyche and to discover far more about the psychodrama’s strange blend of inner and exterior events. And to do all of that, we have to trust ourselves and our impulses.
“In order to be sane and healthy, in order to even begin to understand our potentials as a species, we have to cultivate ideas and philosophies that provide us with a secure psychological base as good creatures, alive in a good universe. Otherwise, by our own definitions, we condemn ourselves as meaningless subjective mechanisms, or as the sinful children of an ancient revengeful god.
“And, as Seth states in his The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, we must redefine our ideas of good and evil and reexamine the characteristics of idealism so that we really understand that the end cannot justify the means taken to achieve it. Our ideals must be reflected in the methods we use to fulfill them. These are all issues in which each of us can be personally involved by studying them as they appear in our personal lives.
“It’s vitally important that we examine and explore the reaches of our own consciousnesses, gather evidence of those unofficial psychic events held in such disgrace by science and religion, and build up our own confidence. We need to examine the very contents and processes of our minds—not with instruments but with our consciousness itself.
“As I type this final chapter, Rob has just finished his work on Seth’s The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, and Seth is already on Chapter 9 of Dreams, ‘Evolution,’ and Value Fulfillment. I’ve clocked many more hours of trancetime, of course, and I’m still trying to map those contours of the psyche in which my subjective travels happen. There is a point, though, where the private psyche opens up to the mass psyche and where they both become aware of a still greater Source from which all reality emerges.
“The completed manuscript for Mass Events sits on Rob’s desk right now. And even if we can’t prove Seth’s model of reality any more than we can science’s or religion’s, certainly Seth provides a more intellectually and emotionally satisfying one as far as I’m concerned, and one that leaves us room for gallant, meaningful action.
“And how strange that my private impulses led me to a kind of public vision in which we all uphold a democracy of spirit and insist upon interpreting not just the Bible but the nature of reality for ourselves!”