“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: You equate the color white with brilliant consciousness, good, and youth, and the color black with the unconscious, old age and death.

In this value system the black races are feared, as, basically, the aged are feared. The blacks are considered the primitives. To them are assigned creative musical abilities, for example, but for a long time these were “underground” activities: They gave birth to acceptable musical productions but were not admitted themselves into the concert halls of the respectable nation.

In your society therefore the black race has represented what you think of as the chaotic, primitive, spontaneous, savage, unconscious portions of the self, the underside of the “proper American citizen.”

The blacks were to be oppressed then on the one hand, and yet treated indulgently as children on the other. There was always a great fear that the blacks as a race would escape their bounds — given an inch they would take a yard — simply because the whites so greatly feared the nature of the inner self, and recognized the power that they tried so desperately to strangle within themselves.

Nations, like individuals, can have split personalities at times. So there was a give-and-take involved in which the blacks expressed certain tendencies for the country as a whole, while the whites expressed other characteristics.

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.

Through the ages, again, underground philosophies have tried to combine the two concepts, usually going from one extreme to the other in combating the current ideas in historical terms. In some of these philosophies the daylight is seen as pallid, for example, in comparison with the true brilliance of knowledge that illuminates the dream state, and black is the symbol then of secret knowledge that cannot be found with normal consciousness, or be scrutinized in the light of day.

Here you find stories of black magicians; and, once more, age enters in so that the legends of the wise old man or woman rise into folklore. Death is viewed in terms of value judgments of good and evil and black and white — the annihilation of consciousness being perceived as black, and its resurrection as white.

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.

In many ancient civilizations, the night with its blackness was revered, and the secrets of nighttime consciousness explored. Correlations were made in which such knowledge was used consciously in the daytime. The two seemingly separate aspects of consciousness merged, and there were flowerings of art and civilization that are, in your terms now, almost impossible to conceive. And in such civilizations all races were accorded their place, joyfully, and those of all ages were respected for their particular contributions.