“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

Let us take a particular feeling and follow it through as it might be expressed at various levels of consciousness. (Pause.) Begin with a feeling of joy. In normal consciousness, the immediate environment will be perceived in a far different manner than it would be, say, if an individual were in a state of depression. The feeling of joy changes the objects themselves, in that the perceiver sees them in a far brighter light. He creates the objects far more vividly and with greater clarity. In feedback fashion, the environment then seems to reinforce his joy.

(9:41.) What he sees, however, is still physical, the objects of the material world. Pretend now that he begins to daydream and falls into a reverie. Into his inner mind come pictures or symbols of material objects, people or events, from perhaps the past as well as present and future imaginings, the joy now being expressed with greater freedom mentally, but with symbols.

The joy stretches out, so to speak, into the future, sheds also its light into the past, and may cover greater areas of expansion than could be shown in physical terms at that moment. Now imagine that our individual from his reverie falls either into a trance state or into a deep sleep. (Long pause.) He may see images that are highly symbolic to him of joy or exuberance. Logically there may be little connection between them, but intuitively the connections are clear. He now enters into his mental experiences far more deeply than in the reverie state, and may have a series of dream episodes in which he is able to express his joy and share it with others.

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.

At different levels, consciousness works with different kinds of symbols. Symbols are a method of expressing inner reality. Working in one direction the soul, using its consciousness, expresses inner reality through as many symbols as possible, through living, changing symbolism. Each symbol itself then is to its own extent conscious, individual, and aware.

Symbols that behave in this way can be clues to you that you are now at another stage of consciousness, and within an entirely different interior environment. Expression of feelings and of experiences are not limited to the rigid framework of objects stuck into consecutive moments. Feelings are automatically transformed and expressed in a new, mobile, immediate manner. In a way the tune of consciousness is quicker.