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As Mary Rouen of Brass Ring and I spoke of our idea to run a Jane Roberts Classics in Consciousness Special in May, Roberts's birthday month, Mary sent me an email. "One last thought," she wrote, "we can't make her sound like a saint!"

"Ha ha ha," I wrote back. Roberts, in colorful language, I'm sure, would laugh at the idea of herself as a saint. But I knew exactly what Mary meant. Roberts's work has been, for many of us, life altering. And there are always those who are more than willing to make a saint out of someone this influential. On the contrary, after publishing new editions of Adventures in Consciousness, Psychic Politics, and The God of Jane, her three primary non-Seth works (the first of Moment Point Press's Classics in Consciousness series), I realize Roberts has become, in my mind at least, too human and complex to be sanctified. A fascinating genius, intellectually rigorous, but wholly human. That, I believe, is the key to why Jane Roberts's work endures.

Because Roberts had an extraordinarily curious and intelligent mind but was not part of the academic or the scientific world, and because her start in life, her home life and education, were well outside of the so-called average American social structure that often leads to conformity, she naturally, almost naively, asked new questions. Physicist Fred Alan Wolf says, for example, that Roberts's "insights into time, gravity, and space are far richer than [he has] seen in the reports of top physicists attempting to deal with the same questions." Unhampered by the structure of any one academic discipline—physics or psychology or sociology or medicine or whatever—Roberts was able to look at the world in a highly original way.

Residing outside of social and academic norms, she relied on her own personal way of thinking, reasoning, and seeing. She believed in the vigorous intellectual pursuit of answers, but didn't play the detached academic looking at her psychic abilities, or Seth, or consciousness, from a supposedly objective viewpoint. She placed herself smack in the middle of her explorations. As Susan Watkins explains in her introduction to the new edition of The God of Jane, Roberts explores consciousness by "using the most straightforward and yet most difficult means available to her—the workings of everyday life in all of its mundane, seemingly happenstance, minutiae." And for the most part, Roberts is able to maintain an amazing degree of honesty with herself. When she slips, it's highly instructive.

For example, every time I read her discussion of Sue Watkins's poem "The God of Sue," in The God of Jane, I have to laugh. Clearly Roberts struggled with her attitudes toward male and female roles and characteristics. The issue crops us again and again in her work and Seth points it out to her more than once. Yet, here she writes, "Sue's poem also surprised me in that it visualized the God of Sue as She," as if this were a quaint notion. When thinking of her own God of Jane, she claims, "I just didn't think of sexual elements at all." Her little blind spot holds up the mirror to our own lives. (How many times do I declare vehemently that I have no issue with thus and such only to realize that I have a BIG issue with thus and such—or I wouldn't be making such a damn issue of it!)

Roberts's approach to her work is always human and highly original. And in these three Classics in Consciousness, in particular, she offers valuable insights into consciousness and poses exciting new questions that open a broader line of thinking:

In Adventures, Roberts lays the foundation that will be the groundwork for all of her explorations. ESP, channeling, Ouija board messages, out-of-body experiences, dream encounters, reincarnational dramas—Roberts sets out to discover the answers to the origins of this entire range of events for which science has found no official proof. Her theory of aspect psychology opens new ways of approaching the existence of a character like Seth—an entity conventional ways of seeing don't even begin to explain.

In Psychic Politics, Roberts introduces three concepts that are key to understanding her entire body of work: the library, a super-real storehouse of "probable" books that tell of the paths human consciousness has not yet taken; counterparts, simultaneous incarnations living on earth today so as to broaden the fabric of their individual soul's experience; and the codicils, an alternative set of rules for human existence that could transform the framework of our entire civilization.

In The God of Jane (my personal favorite), Roberts addresses many of the same issues that we readers have had in trying to incorporate Seth's theories into our own lives, particularly Seth's basic teaching which states that we are each gods, creating our realities moment to moment. As we come to know Roberts—her doubts, fears, humor, intelligence, her compassion and impatience—we come to better understand our hand in the creation of our individual lives and to sense our own godhoods. (And, by the way, if there's a more vivid description of reincarnation than that presented in the "Tale of the Seamstress," I've never encountered it.)

I believe we can acknowledge Jane Roberts's gifts without sanctifying her. As with anyone who positively influences our lives, it's only common courtesy to express thanks. Not by kneeling at the person's feet, or handing over to them our personal power. A simple, heartfelt "thank you" for the insights they've provided is enough. So this month with quiet ceremony, Brass Ring offers three Classics in Consciousness in appreciation of Jane Roberts, for having had the courage to explore her gifts in her own way and offering her ideas to the world—ideas that continue to challenge and inspire us.

Susan Ray runs Moment Point Press. See page 12 for complete product information and new special pricing on the three "Classics in Consciousness".