“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

(11:37.) There is a give-and-take chemical reaction, or rather chemical rhythms of reactions, that are far more effective in the shorter sleep periods. Many of you sleep through periods that should be those of your greatest creativity and alertness, in which the conscious and unconscious are most beautifully focused and at one. The conscious mind is often drugged with sleep just when it could be deriving its greatest benefits from the unconscious, and be able to poise most meaningfully in the reality that you know. In these instances the beauty and illumination of your dream state can be clear in the conscious mind, and used to enrich your physical life. Contrasts in your experience will appear to you in their united clarity.