“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“All right.”)

Within your own personality all facets of your consciousness converge, whether or not you are aware of it.

You may be “conscious” and reacting to a remembered event so strongly that you are relatively unaware of present events. You take all of these fluctuations for granted. They do not disturb you. If you are lost in a book and unaware momentarily of your immediate environment, you are not afraid that it will be gone when you want to turn your attention back to it. Nor in a daydream do you usually worry about returning safely to the present moment.

To some extent, all of these are small examples of the mobility of your consciousness, and the ease with which it can be used. In a strange manner, symbols can be regarded as samples of the way you perceive at various levels of consciousness. Their changing guises can be used as signposts. Fire, for example, is a symbol made physical, so a real fire tells you obviously that you are perceiving reality with your physically attuned consciousness.

(9:33.) A mental picture of a fire automatically tells you that another kind of consciousness is involved. A fire mentally seen that has warmth but does not burn destructively obviously means something else. All symbols are an attempt to express feelings, feelings that can never be expressed adequately through language. Symbols represent the infinite variations of feelings, and in various stages of consciousness these will appear in different terms, but they will always accompany you.

(9:51.) The physical body all the while is greatly benefitted, because the beneficial feelings automatically renew and replenish its recuperative abilities. The feelings of joy now may lead to images of Christ, Buddha, or the prophets. These symbols are the changing scenes characteristic of consciousness at various stages. The experiences are to be considered as creations; creative acts all native to consciousness at various stages.

It feels direct experience. If we use joy as our example, all mental symbols and images of it would finally disappear. They had emerged from it, and would fall away from it, not being the original experience, but by-products. The soul would then begin to explore the reality of this joy in terms that can hardly be explained, and in so doing would learn methods of perception, expression, and actualization that would have been utterly incomprehensible to it before.

Now: Physical objects are the most obvious of your symbols, and precisely for that reason you do not realize that they are symbols at all.

In so doing, the soul continually creates new varieties of inner reality to be explored. Working in the opposite direction, so to speak, the soul divests itself of all symbols, all representations, and using its consciousness in a different way learns to probe its own direct experience. Without symbols to come between it and experience, it perfects itself in a kind of value fulfillment that you presently cannot understand except symbolically.

(10:23.) You will use the idea of a body in most stages of consciousness. When you leave your physical body in any kind of out-of-body experience, you actually leave it in another that is only slightly less physical. This in turn is “later” discarded for one still less physical, but the idea of the form is so important a symbol that you carry it through all of your religious literature, and stories of hereafter.

Those stages of consciousness that occur after death still all deal with symbols, though there is much greater freedom in their use, and greater understanding of their meaning. But in higher stages of consciousness, the symbols are no longer necessary, and creativity takes place completely without their use.

All symbols stand for inner realities, therefore, and when you juggle symbols, you are juggling inner realities. Any exterior move that you make is made within the interior environment, within all the interior environments with which you are involved.