“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Some of this has to do with distorted ideas of both the conscious and unconscious minds, using your terms now. Generally speaking, in Western society the conscious mind is seen as coming into its own in early adulthood, as the self rises from the bed of childhood unconsciousness into its critical awareness and differentiation. The appreciation of distinctions and differences is considered one of the greatest characteristics of consciousness, and so those aspects of it are valued. On the other hand the equally significant assimilating, combining, correlating characteristics of consciousness are overlooked. In scholarly circles, and many that are not scholarly at all, the intellect is equated only with the critical faculties, so that the more diagnostic you are the more intellectual you are considered.

When an individual becomes older — and retired, for example — the focus for that particular kind of concentration is no longer so immediately available. The mind actually becomes more itself, freer to use more of its abilities, allowed to stray from restricted areas, to assimilate, acknowledge and create.

There are ways of assimilating your inner knowledge, your contrasting values of light and darkness, good and bad, youth and old age, and of using such criteria to enrich your own experience in a most practical fashion. In so doing you will enhance not only yourself and your society, but the world at large. You will also recognize the state of grace in which you must exist. Let us look at some of those ways.

In such circumstances, there are not the great artificial divisions created between the two states of consciousness. The conscious mind is better able to remember and assimilate its dreaming experience, and in dreams the self can use its waking experience more efficiently.