“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

— and we will resume dictation…. Your beliefs about age, like everything else, will form your experience, and your mass beliefs will affect your civilization. With the current concepts held by your society, men and women fear old age from the time of youth. If young adulthood is considered the epitome of life, blessedness, and success, then old age is viewed as the opposite — a time of failure and decay.

Precisely at this time however the individual is told to beware of any such straying, and to consider that kind of behavior a symptom of mental deterioration. Those following mass beliefs will find that their own image of themselves has changed. They fear that their very age, or existence in time, has betrayed them. They see themselves as leftovers, dim vestiges of better selves, and in their own system of value judgment they condemn themselves through the very fact of their continued existence in time. If they ever did, they no longer trust the integrity of their bodies. They begin to act out the drama in a script written by others — to which, however, they have acquiesced.

It may not seem that there is any connection between that situation and your beliefs involving color, and yet the two are intimately associated.

Applied to old age, the color black denotes a returning to those unconscious forces. Now all of this so far is from the standpoint of American and Western belief. It is simply the reality in which many of my readers are involved. In other “underground” systems of belief, however, black is seen as a symbol of great knowledge, power and strength. When this is carried to an extreme you wind up with devil cults, in which the poorly understood powers of creativity and exuberance rush out in distorted form; the undersides of consciousness are then glorified at the expense of the other, white, “conscious and objective” values.

All of this is also connected with your beliefs about the waking and dreaming states, white being acquainted with the day, and black with the dreaming condition. Here again is the old connection between the God of Light and the Prince of Darkness, or Satan — all distinctions made at various levels of development, and having to do with the nature of the origin of the present consciousness.

The light of illumination is experienced as white, yet it often appears to delineate the darkness of the soul, or to shine in the black of night. So in your terms of reference the two are dependent one upon the other, changing their connotations according to your beliefs.

Often in the aged you find such frameworks coming into being naturally, but those who awaken spontaneously after four hours consider themselves insomniacs because of their beliefs, and so cannot utilize their experience properly. Both the conscious and unconscious would operate far more effectively, however, under an abbreviated sleeping program, and for those involved in “creative” endeavors this kind of schedule would bring greater intuition and applied knowledge.