You do not understand the dimensions into which your own thoughts drop, for they continue their own existence, and others look up to them and view them like stars. I am telling you that your own thoughts and mental actions appear to inhabitants of other systems like the stars and planets within your own; and those inhabitants do not perceive what lies within and behind the stars in their own heavens.

As to the origin of life, any life, I thought, we remain ignorant. Our science theorizes about the beginning of the cosmos or the birth of life. Our religions postulate endless versions of a man-God, hardly more rational than we are, as the Creator. In the past I have sometimes thought that maybe life is meaningless after all. Then I'd think that maybe the Seth material is a kind of cosmic poppycock -- the chemical composition of my mind somehow intelligent enough to understand the irony of its own meaninglessness, then spinning desperate yarns, as many psychologists would say; futile fantasies leading nowhere. But then I'd think that a brain that could conceive or order somehow had to emerge from a greater order. Besides that, earlier I hadn't realized (I thought, feeling better) that science and religion had spun some pretty weird yarns themselves, and if poppycock was being measured on a scale of one to ten, in my book anyhow they'd each get a twelve and a gold star.

For an exercise, then, imagine for a while that the subjective world of your thoughts, feelings, inner images and fantasies represent the 'rockbed reality' from which individual physical events emerge. Look at the world for a change from the inside out, so to speak. Imagine that physical experience is somehow the materialization of your own subjective reality. Forget what you have learned about reactions and stimuli. Ignore for a time everything you have believed and see your thoughts as the real events. Try to view normal physical occurrences as the concrete physical reactions in space and time to your own feelings and beliefs. For indeed your subjective world causes your physical experience.

There is never any justification for violence. There is no any justification for hatred. There is no any justification for murder. Those who indulge in violence for whatever reason are themselves changed, and the purity of their purpose adulterated.

Devils and demons have no objective existence. They have always represented, again, portions of mankind’s own psychological reality that to some extent he had not assimilated -- but in a schizophrenic kind of expression, projected instead outward from himself.

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.

So I had to face the fact that I was blessed with abilities that were considered symptoms of emotional abnormality or mental derangement by psychology, often thought of as demonic by religion, and whose very existence was denied altogether by science. So in my darker moments I used to think that my psychic initiation and subsequent experiences were a mixed bag, to say the least. But the fact is that I was very sensitive to criticism for the very good reason that often I shared many of the beliefs that stimulated it.

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Your desire or beliefs will literally be reaching back into time, teaching the nerves new tricks. Definite reorganizations in that past will occur in your present, allowing you to behave in entirely new fashions. Learned behavior therefore alters not only present and future but also past conduct.

Everything was giant-sized, as if I were looking through binoculars. "I" was walking up giant stalks. At first I didn't know what they were or what I was, for that matter. The stalks were tall as redwood trees, and suddenly "I" realized that I was an insect of some kind. This was a grass blade. I thought I was a fly in a gigantic forest -- a giant fly, because everything was so large and super-real, and I'm used to thinking of flies as small. But I was an ordinary fly. I realized, and this was what the world looked like! Oddly enough, this made me feel better, I didn't care what I was; as long as I was something. So I felt myself go up the grass blade. It's impossible to verbalize the sensations I had, but I remember being aware of the weight of my wings. They seemed very sturdy and reassuring.

Your own inner capabilities and potentials are more varied and powerful than you realize. The purpose of this book is to enable you to recognize and use them in daily life. You use them now, but in a subdued and inefficient manner. They work in spite of you.