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.

From The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto by Jane Roberts