“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now, in your experiences this evening you have been dealing with symbols and you bring them to life. This is exactly what you are doing every day of your life in your normal hours of activity but you do not recognize the symbols. You simply perceive the objects that come from the symbols. When you are working with your consciousness, as you did this evening, you become aware of the inner symbols in your own mind. Now, there are symbols that are personal but there are also symbols that are, in your terms, universal and you build with these.

Now, (to Natalie) someone was trying to speak to you this evening and you have been doing very well.

This evening it was but in a different guise. Besides the person of whom you are aware, there are also other guises taken by the same personality, and he has appeared in your dreams before you were aware of him objectively. And like our class member the Dean, you will begin to follow your own way. Do not be impatient, however.

Now, so-called occult knowledge dealt with secret knowledge, and it is secret to the extent that every man must discover it for himself and that is the end of the secrecy. But, in one manner of speaking, it cannot be told for you must have your own experience and recognize it. Very briefly this evening some of you dealt with the reality of symbols, and this is extremely important for the physical body that you know is a materialization of symbols that you have created. You do not know the symbols for yourselves but you can discover what they are, and I will expect you all to do so.

Now, what do you suppose Christmas means? The birth of the inner self. Each of you must be reborn, not once, but endless times even in this existence, in this existence as you know it. You break out of yourselves. When you are joyful you break out of yourselves.

And so, if you are very innocent and a child, and you read our story, you have a pageant of characters. But if you look beneath you see that there is much more and that the story is merely the coating. It gives you suspense and Ruburt would say it gives you a great story line and while you are reading the story, however, you are automatically taking in the inner truths that are within it whether or not you are consciously aware of what you are doing. Now, this is only a partial, very partial, explanation for something that you are.

In certain portions of your world there were memories from other peoples and other layers of existence, and these memories for some time remained. They were part of your racial unconscious as it developed. You knew for example, some of you, that in other existences you had other abilities and used them well. Some of you, in previous existences, before this planet was as you know it, were a part of highly technical civilizations which you ruined out of avarice and greed and ignorance; spiritual ignorance. And so you began once again as savages. And yet no knowledge can be removed from you and no sense of your identity, past, present or future, can be divided from you and as you yourself do the dividing. And so in your dreams you remember the past in which you have been involved and so it seemed to you these had been forced out of a garden. Now this particular situation was reenacted many times and many places and not in one way only.

The rest (to Gert) of the ghost affair—so you decided to start over and to hide from yourself your earlier errors. You did not have a conscious rapport. It is difficult to start an exam the second time when you knew you failed it the first time around. So you started out with great vigor trying to hide from yourself the fact that you had tried this before. No sense of original sin, however, is implied. This was your interpretation of certain perceptions. It was much easier to believe that you had been kicked out of a garden of paradise than to realize that you ruined it yourselves. Do you follow me?

([Joel Hess:]“Where do the demons come in?”)

You are, indeed, correct. There is nothing to fear. The knowledge is symbolic in terms that you do not yet intellectually understand. Automatically in daily life you translate symbols into what you call reality. The information is at your fingertips, you have simply gotten away from it. You form appearances from symbols but you are so lost in the world of appearances that you forget the symbols upon which you have formed the reality.

Because there are millions of people upon the earth who would rather have someone speak and tell them what to do, rather than do it for themselves, that is why.

You are, indeed. You will find your own way. You will know what it is, and you know what it is now. You do not need me to tell you.

And what (to Ned) I said to you still goes, if you remember what I said, having to do with the service.

They are symbolic and they are a universal symbol having to do with condensed knowledge. The word condensed is extremely important in that context.