Self Help Writers From The United States

"Some of my ideas certainly came from my mother's father. She and he had a family argument and didn't see each other for twenty years, though we all lived in the same town. Mother wouldn't let my grandfather in the house. She let me visit him though. He was part Indian and part French, a tiny dark-haired man with an Indian hoked-nose; tight-lipped and stubborn. But he talked to me about the spirits of the fire and the wind, and took me for long walks in a nearby woods, while he told me Indian legends."

"Old hates lie in wait for the infant till he grows into a man. Then they leap upon him when he puts his father's coat on. When the father's bones drop into the grave, the lice flock up as the dark earth turns, to feed on a son's guilt-love. No man can look in his son's face, for what was done to him, he does in turn, and he carries the hate in his blood; ghosts of times forgotten, tragedies unseen, unspoken,wait in the past's proud flesh, and nothing will shake them off."

"There aren't any even halfway reasonable dogmas around nowadays, not one that doesn't offend or outrage either the intellect or the intuitions."

"Despite the beliefs and teachings of religion and psychology, impulses are biological and psychic directional signals to nudge the individual toward his or her greatest opportunities for expression and development privately, and also to insure the person's contribution to mass social reality."

"In Framework 2, extra-natural help, energy, impetus, and knowledge are 'naturally' available. . . . But only when your own beliefs are clear enough so that the help is not blocked."

"I don't feel "possessed" or "invaded during sessions. I don't feel that some superspirit has "taken over" my body. Instead I feel as if I am practicing some precise psychological art, one that is ancient and poorly understood in our culture; or as if I'm learning a psychological science that helps me map the contours of consciousness itself."

"You cannot love someone you do not know -- not unless you water down the definition of love so much that it becomes meaningless."

"Many men, labelled homosexual by themselves and others, want to be fathers. Their beliefs and those of your society leads them to imagine that they must always be heterosexual or homosexual. Many feel a desire toward women that is also inhibited. Your male or female orientation limits you in ways that you do not understand. For example, in many cases the gentle "homosexual" father has a better innate idea of manliness than a heterosexual male who believes that men must be cruel, insensitive, and competitive."

"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."

"There are lost portions of the Bible having to do with sexuality, and with Christ’s beliefs concerning it, that were considered blasphemous and did not come down to you through history."

"Physically, however, the body is quite able to completely regenerate itself as it approaches old age. Indeed, a quite legitimate second puberty is possible, in which the male’s seed is youthfully strong and vital, and the woman’s womb is pliable and able to bear . . . Now, to some extent there is a connection between this innate, rarely observed second puberty and the development of cancer, in which growth is specifically apparent in an exaggerated manner."

"In larger terms, it is as natural for a man to love a man, and for a woman to love a woman, as it is to show love for the opposite sex. For that matter, it is more natural to be bisexual."

"A relatively strong sexual identification is important under those circumstances - but (louder) an over-identification with them, before or afterward, can lead to stereotyped behavior, in which the greater needs and abilities of the individual are not allowed fulfillment."

"A mind is a psychic pattern through which you interpret and form reality. You have physical limbs that you can see. You have minds that are invisible. Each one can organize reality in a different fashion. Each one deals with its own kind of knowledge. These minds all work together to keep you alive through the physical structure of the brain. When you use all of these minds, then and only then do you become fully aware of your surroundings: You perceive reality more clearly than you do now, more sharply, brilliantly and concisely. At the same time, however, you comprehend it directly."

"In dreams you are so 'dumb' that you believe there is a commerce between the living and the dead. You are so 'irrational' as to imagine that you sometimes speak to parents who are dead. You are so 'unrealistic' that it seems to you that you visit old houses, long ago torn down, or that you travel in exotic foreign cities that you have actually never visited. In dreams you are so 'insane' you do not feel yourself locked in a closet of time and space, but feel instead as if all infinity but waited your beckoning."

"To one extent or another, then, you learn to constantly monitor your behavior, so that it conforms to the established criteria set up for sane or rational experience. You are social creatures, as the animals are. Despite many of your cherished, erroneous beliefs, your nations exist as the result of cooperation, not competition, as do all social groupings."

"Emir said: "This way everyone lives in a body of a kind for a while, and then leaves its body behind so that it can be remade for someone else. That's a very simple explanation, but it will do for now. Then all new life has a chance to live, and lots of room. Then we each take turns, so we can come back on new bodies when there's room available."

"The spirits of people and creatures and plants don't take up any room at all. But their bodies do. Bodies are like houses our spirits live in, only they're far nicer, of course. There's only room for so many bodies in the kingdom, whether they're plant bodies or creature bodies or people bodies. After a while, we have to leave our body-houses to make room for new things."

"The message of the God of All Life is in all of nature, everywhere. If you really listen, you'll hear it."

"The God of All Life was really more like a light than anything else, and the whole divine arena just lit up as if a universal spotlight was turned on from the inside of things, bathing every visible object. Everything Emir saw was lit up as if even the blades of grass had bulbs inside them, though bulbs hadn't been invented yet or spotlights either. Still, a new kind of superlight splashed out over the arena. More than this, the light itself was somehow kindly and alive, as if the God of All Life was everywhere at once, made of light, but with a presence inside that was invisible."

"There was a god or goddess of wind, rain, lightning, thunder, clouds, stars, sun, and of course, the moon goddess, and they all more or less worked under SkyMaker."

"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."

"I know that the earth was new, but I didn't realize that it wasn't finished yet."

"I thought you understood," he said. "The world is your teacher. It will be all around you. The ocean and the wind and the stars and the moon will all teach you many things."

"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."

"In terms that I admit are difficult to describe, the creative solutions will change the course of history in the past, so that variations are taken, and technology does not progress in the same way that it has in your experience."

"However, suicides and would-be suicides often have such a great literal lust for life that they constantly put it into jeopardy, so that they can experience what it is in heightened form."

"You take it for granted that interpretations of events change, but that certain definite events occurred that are beyond alteration. Instead, the events themselves are not nearly that concrete. You accept one probable event. Someone else may experience instead a version of that event, which then becomes that individual’s felt reality."

"Ruburt’s life as he knows it is not in my memory -- because I did different things when I was Ruburt. And he is not bound by that reality that was mine."

"I have memories of being Ruburt - but the Ruburt I was is not the Ruburt that Ruburt is in his reality."

"Again, your being is never annihilated, but continues to develop its own existence in other ways. A portion of you has lived many lives upon this planet, but the "you" that you know is freshly here, and will never again encounter space and time in precisely the same way. The same applies to each life lived either before or after. Biologically you rest upon a heritage, however, and psychically the same applies. The soul, or this greater personage, does not simply send out an old self in new clothes time and time again, but each time a new, freshly-minted self that then develops and goes its own way. That self rides firmly, however, in the great flight of experience, and feels within itself all of those other fully unique versions that also fling their way into existence."

"Part of the unknown reality, then, is hidden beneath language and the enforced pattern of accustomed words-so, for an exercise, look about your environment. Make up new, different 'words' for the objects that you see about you. Pick up any object, for example. Hold it for a few seconds, feel its texture, look at its color, and spontaneously give it a new name by uttering the sounds that come into your mind. See how the sounds bring out certain aspects of the object that you may not have noticed before. The new word will fit as much as the old one did. It may, in fact, fit better. Do this with many objects, following the same procedure. You can instead say the name of any object backwards. In such ways you break up to some extent the automatic patterning of familiar phrases, so that you can perceive the individuality that is within each object."

"It is fashionable to say: You must not eat meat because you are killing the animals, and this is wrong. But in deeper terms, physically and biologically the animals are born from the body of the earth, which is composed of the corpses of men and women as much as it is of other matter. The animals consume you, then, as often as you consume them, and they are as much a part of your humanity as you are a part of their so called animal nature."

"Time expands in all directions, and away from any given point. The past is never finished, and the future is never completely formed. You choose to experience certain versions of events. You then organize these, nibbling at them, so to speak, a bit "at a time." The creativity of any given entity is endless, and yet all of the potentials for experience will be explored . . . You follow in terms of continuity one version of yourself at any given "time" . . . Quite literally, you live more than one life at a time. You do not experience your century simply from one separate vantage point, and the individuals alive in any given century have far deeper connections that you realize. You do not experience your space-time world, then, from one but from many viewpoints."

"Through him I am aware of the nature and condition of your world, and offer from my viewpoint comments meant to help you. Through Ruburt, then, I am permitted to view the earth again in your terms. I exist apart from him, as he exists apart from me, yet we together a part of the same entity - and that simply carries the idea of the psyche further."

"There is no transmigration of souls, in which the entire personality of a person comes back as an animal."

"Pretend that you are a writer of fiction, and you create a character. This character is so independent, alive and real, that it in turn forms other characters -- and each writes its own book, or forms its own reality. That is a truer picture of your position."

"There have indeed been civilizations upon your planet that understood as well as you, and without your kind of technology, the workings of the planets, the positioning of the stars -- people who even foresaw "later" global changes. They used a mental physics. There were men before you who brought back data quite as "scientific" and pertinent. There were those who understood the "origin" of your solar system far better than you. Some of these civilizations did not need spaceships. Instead, highly trained men combining the abilities of dream-art scientists and mental physicists cooperated at journeys not only through time but through space."

"This (precognitive ability) steers the cell through mazes of probabilities, while allowing it to retain knowledge of its own greater fulfillment -- the ideas of itself, which is always alive in any given period of your time. On a different kind of scale, then, each individual has the same sort of idealized version of the self, and so does each species. Here I mean each species, and I am not simply referring to mankind. Obviously these are not apparent to the physical senses, yet they are strong energy centers that to some degree stimulate the physical senses toward activity. To that degree, then, there are indeed "tree gods," gods of the forest, and "gods of being" connected with each person."

"The totem pole, for example, is a remnant from an era where there was much greater communication between man and the animals -- when, in fact, men went to the animals to learn, and from them first acquired knowledge of herbs and corrective medicinal behavior."

"Civilizations, both past and present represent projections of inner selfhood, and mirror the state of the mass psyche at any given time."

"Civilizations and social orders have not been geared to the fulfillment of human potential (even now, for all of our liberal thought), but to the suppression of abilities that did not fit in with the basic assumptions about the nature of the self. We inhibited any such evidence from conscious awareness, developing a kind of one-line official consciousness. Opposing data did not disappear, but formed powerful undercurrents that composed the unofficial knowledge of the race."

"We are a multitude of selves, and the sooner we learn that, the better. And in that rich alliance of psychological Aspects lies the very secret of our practical operative stability. Only because we change our positions constantly in reference to the psyche and the world are we able to manipulate physically and translate inner experience into sense terms."

"I believe too thoroughly that we create our own reality, for one thing -- an unpopular belief where violence is concerned -- but I'm convinced that the victim-to-be picks out the assailant with as much skill and craft as the murderer seeks his victim, and until we learn much more about both, we'll get nowhere battling crime. I'm not justifying murder by any means, but I'm saying that the victim wants to be murdered -- perhaps to be punished, if not by a vengeful god then by one of his fellows, and that a would-be murderer can switch in a minute and become the victim instead; and that the slayer wants to be slain."

"I saw us as coming from a source self, free of space and time, into this reality. The focus personality (or the self we know) focuses in this life, but is also composed of other Aspects or parts of the source self that are latent within the psyche, though "alive" in other realities. These form the basic structure of the psyche from which the focus personality emerges. I call these "prime Aspects." A harmonious working relationship between these prime Aspects results in a well-balanced focus personality -- one that is reasonably happy, healthy, and creative."

"The psyche is awareized energy, in a state of constant creativity; a psychic pattern of multidimensionally expressed; each point within it changing in relationship to all other points, and thus altering the entire pattern or model. Each self is immersed in the psyche, yet immersed in its own individuality simultaneously, experiencing reality in time and out of it at once."

"Each identity has free will and chooses its environment as a physical stance in space and time. Those involved in a given century are working on particular problems and challenges. Various races do not simply 'happen,' and diverse cultures do not just appear. The greater self 'divides' itself, manifesting in flesh as several individuals, with entirely different backgrounds, yet each embarked on the same kind of creative challenge."

"The most legitimate instances of communication between the living and the dead occur in an intimate personal framework in which a dead parent makes contact with its offspring; a husband or wife freshly out of physical reality appears to his or her mate. But very seldom do historic personages make contact except with their own intimate circles."

"He said, for example: "Many people working with the Ouija board or automatic writing receive messages that seem, or purport, to come from historic personages. Often, however, the material is vastly inferior to that which could have been produced by the person in question during his or her earthly existence. Any comparison with the material received to the written books or accounts already existing would immediately show glaring discrepancies. Yet in many instances, the Ouija board operator or the automatic writer is to some extent or other tuning in to a world view, struggling to open roads of perception free enough to perceive an altered version of reality, but not equipped enough through training and temperament, perhaps to express it. . . ."

"Ruburt tuned in to the world view of a man known dead. He was not directly in communication with William James. He was aware, however, of the universe through William James' world view. As you might tune into a program on a television set, Ruburt tuned into the view of reality now held in the mind of William James. Because that view necessarily involved emotions, Ruburt felt some sense of emotional contact -- but only with the validity of the emotions. Each person has such a world view, whether living or dead in your terms, and that "living picture" exists despite time or space. It can be perceived by others."