Life & Wisdom Quote by Jane Roberts

Roberts is quietly yanking the rug out from under the modern cult of “rational discourse.” On the surface, she grants words and logic their due; beneath that, she demotes them to instruments, not engines. The line is built like a trapdoor: you start in the well-lit rooms of language and reason, then drop into the basement where affiliations, fears, loyalties, and longings actually decide what counts as “reasonable” in the first place.

The intent isn’t to sneer at logic, but to expose its choreography. “Beneath” signals hierarchy: emotion isn’t a glitch in the system, it’s the operating system. Logic becomes a kind of post-production work, the story we tell after the fact to make our instincts sound principled. That’s why the phrasing “how we use” matters. She’s not claiming emotions erase logic; she’s saying they steer it, like hands on a wheel that the driver insists isn’t there.

Context sharpens the edge. Roberts, best known for the Seth material and a broader mid-century interest in consciousness, wrote in an era when psychology and self-help were colliding with Cold War technocracy: a society loudly committed to reason, efficiency, expertise. Her sentence reads as a counterweight to that public posture, insisting the private interior life is not secondary but directive.

The subtext is unsettlingly current: arguments online aren’t failing because people lack facts; they’re failing because the facts are auditioning for belonging. Connection first, cognition second.