“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.

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.

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.