Great Throughts Treasury

"I learned to see thoughts as spatially extended creatures which, no sooner than they were born, were clothed with form and life."

"Once I heard my aunt refer to them as 'poor Anthony and Anna' in a tone that held both pity and disapproval, and a sympathy for them stirred within me . . . It was explained to me later that Anna and Anthony were my dead parents. I was glad then that I had given their names to many living things that I had cherished."

"The little dead bodies were quiet, but a strange movement was occurring all about them. A gray, smoke-like substance rose up from each small form. This nebulous, fluid stuff wove and curled as it rose in winding spiral curves, and I saw it take new shape as it moved out and away from the quiet forms."

"I have seen such a world where forms and half-made shapes moved and struggled."

"I conceive of yesterday, today, and tomorrow as a single curve … time loses reality and the past and present and future are present in one instant."

"If mind exists, (and I believe it to be universal) the shock of separation from the brain must of necessity at such planned deductions, and one can only, within a new 'vessel’ experience something akin to a dreaming remembrance of things past. … How much is remembered in the new state of consciousness … does the dragonfly remember his form as the chrysalis of yesterday?"

"Be at peace and see a clear pattern running through your lives. Nothing is by chance."

"For myself, I do not need to look in terms of survival after death. I feel myself to be a part of the known properties of the earth's family, and that is enough. One day, the breath I have been privileged to use will become again a part of the earth's family being. . . . If there is another place to catch up with the "breath," I hope it will be as challenging as it has been here; but if it does not exist, it is enough that I have lived."

"Expect your every need to be met, expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level, expect to grow spiritually."

"Insight is within the grasp of the dreamer, for he escapes the waking intensity which tends to hold back the vitality that bids us carry on with life, often as underground levels. The eternal now instinctively carries us forward and contains within it knowledge and experience of the routes ahead, even though those routes are dimmed when we awaken to each day's new experiences. The prediction is clear in a dreaming world, but the route is clouded when we surface to live out the day's experience. The outer eye discerns only what is to be undertaken in a three-dimensional world."

"The language of symbol and dream is the route to the unconscious whole. Within these two facets of mind we must look if we would find security. This has been the route specifically human, the dual level contained within the universal concept of being. It has been mostly a foreign language, but in recent decades we have grown to comprehend that if we could remember the past, we could find the conception of a future which is daily being unfolded."

"I am happy that in an age of technology there are those who are giving modern interpretation to the dream world which contains the key to the development of the evolution of the race. The dream world, and the world of deep feeling which is interpreted by symbols, relate to us the ancient races, for the dreams of ancient man and modern man are given in the same symbolic language."

"Symbolism, with its inner feelings and impressions, is expressed with the same sensory aspects of the outer world's intensity and association. Symbolic dreaming is a survival that leads us from different cultures and different historical associations across centuries. It is still the language of the myth and fairy tale, and it is never forgotten in the unconscious, but too often its meanings are overlooked or not understood. In the symbolic dream, where time and space do not exist, we are linked with our earliest ancestors."

"Isn't there a picture that belongs in the original frame? Life [one suspects she means spiritual life] cannot die. You can explode its dynamism [the physical body] but you cannot dissipate its energy. If you suffer where life suffered, the essence that once filled the frame will take from you something to dramatize and live again."

"There is a place for each individual in the world, but you must seek and find where your place is and where you fit in. If you are afraid to take the responsibility of bringing in the new, do not try to stop those souls who are willing to do it. Realize that those souls who have been trained and inspired to undertake this task will do so, for it is their work. Find your rightful place in the whole vast plan, and if you are not in the front line do not let it disturb you. Remember, all sorts of people are needed to make up the whole. Simply accept your specific work and do what you know you have to do wholeheartedly, and allow those souls who have been placed in the position of leadership and responsibility to go ahead. Give them your full backing and complete loyalty; they need it and appreciate it. Lift up your heart in deep love praise and gratitude for them, and always give of your very best."

"Through the years of my trance communications and research, two control personalities... have always been identified with my work, and they have never ceased to maintain their independent and separate selves. It is interesting to note that they have always welcomed every form of scientific investigation into the nature of their own being and the mechanisms of my supernormal functioning; but up to the present any efforts to dislodge them or to reduce them to aspects of my own consciousness have led to no change in their attitude, position, or state of being. The control personalities still maintain the roles they have always played in relation to me, since my trance work began. I have reached a point in my development where I can live in harmony with myself and at peace with those personalities, for I am now able to regard them as the finer aspects of my true self. Whatever their origin may be, I do not, at present, have at my command the means of knowing; but for the time being, I am content to accept the controls as aspects of a constructive principle upon which my entire life has been built."

"You will not mind if I say that where there is unhappiness in a house and there is an impression of someone [i.e. a departed spirit] coming back, it is because you make for that spirit a Garden of Memory in which it can live and revive its sufferings. Unless you are, consciously or unconsciously, in a state of mind in which this impression can vivify itself, you will not be troubled. Haven't you discovered that these things only happen to you when you are in a bad emotional state, physically or mentally disturbed? Don't you realize that you yourself vivify this memory?"