Jane Roberts on "Front-Door People" and "Back-Door People"

 Jane Roberts on "Front-Door People" and "Back-Door People."

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"INTRODUCTION"

"1. Front-Door People, Back-Door People, and World Views"

"I find myself with still another unconventional manuscript, left at the back door of my mind. The pages fluttered down into my awareness one by one, as if left by some invisible newspaper boy, day after day; the latest installments in a steady line of communications that seem to come from strange lands.

"Without painting this analogy into glowing colors, I'd like to point out my feeling that the conscious mind is like a house of awareness, with an elegant front door through which we receive usual callers and messages. ("Hello. How are you? State your name and business.") This front entrance is swept and well tended; to its doorstep come all official magazines and newspapers. The shrubs of our beliefs are trimmed and pruned, and the regular mailman, whistling cheerfully, leaves the mail at the proper, anticipated times. Neat curtained windows look out to the well-organized streets of the world, and we're told that all messages must come to us through that front door; the only entrance - or exit."

"But no matter what we're told by all of the officials and authorities, we seem to remember a secret back door from the time of our childhood; a "magic" entrance that we discovered when we were left by ourselves, perhaps on rainy afternoons - a door that opened to into other worlds. Vaguely we may recall finding and opening that door on innumerable, nearly forgotten occasions. We may have sensed messengers coming and going; once or twice we may even have found strange packages or papers on the back-door stoop, wet with rain as if they've been waiting there for a long time. But the next time we look, the door is invisible. The wall of awareness is smooth, and we see only the whitewashed walls we've been taught to expect.

"Some of us are just too stubborn and curious to ignore those unofficial events, so symbolically speaking at least, while I keep my front door well tended, I've learned to watch at the back door of my mind. Now and then I stand on the mind's back porch, and sometimes I take a few tentative steps down unofficial paths that lead to unexplored psychological lands that just might correlate with other realities than the one we know.

"The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher was automatically delivered, then, at that back mental doorstep; the installments appearing day after day, while I went about my business, winter turned to spring, and the regular magazines and papers brought by the postman kept me up-to-date on the official world.

"Those periodicals are easy to read. They're written for the front-door people. But we're all both front-door people and back-door people, whether we know it or not. The trouble is that we know how to read the important news that comes to us through the exterior world, but often we just don't know what to do with the equally valid messages that come by the unofficial back route."

"For one thing, the messages left by inspiration or the intuitions are highly personal, intimate; left at our back doorstep and no other, and they have to be read by the part of the mind that is peculiarly suited to their translation. They may deal with symbols, for example, instead of the good clear alphabets we're used to. Sometimes their messages may even seem to contradict the news that comes in the front door, and not only can't we confirm the data with our neighbors, but we have to restructure our own thinking before we can even accept it ourselves.

"So at first I didn't know how to interpret this present manuscript either. Should it be taken literally or symbolically? I tried to put together my knowledge of reality as it comes to me through official and unofficial sources of information, and to use all of my intellectual and intuitive abilities to find the answer.

"Our ordinary consciousness is tuned toward our front door callers, and when our physical senses are stimulated, the front doorbell rings and we respond to whomever or whatever wants our attention. Usually we're so busy responding to those messages that if the back doorbell rings, we don't notice. I've learned to tune my consciousness toward the back door of my mental house and always to keep a portion of my attention focused in that direction.

"In a manner of speaking, I have my own messenger from those unknown psychological realms.

"Like many people, my husband, Rob, and I have a small yard in the rear of our house, but beyond that, there are hills and forests. In my analogy these represent the unofficial areas of the psyche, down whose natural untended banks rush winds from other psychological skies, and messages tumbling like small speckled exotic stones.

"My trance personality, Seth, comes into my consciousness from those other, inner, landscapes. Twice a week he comes through my minds back door and takes an honored place in our living room. I go into trance and he begins to speak, while Rob takes notes. Seth writes his own books in this fashion, explaining the greater realms of consciousness that exist outside our cozy villages of mind."

--The World View of William James: The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher, Introduction 1., page 1 - 3, by Jane Roberts