“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

At one point it will vanish with the other symbols. Now there was a time, speaking in your terms, before the making of symbols; a time so divorced from your idea of reality that only in the most protected areas of sleep does any memory of it ever return. It seems to you that without symbols there would be nonbeing, but this is a natural enough deduction since you are so symbol-oriented.

This of course is obvious, but the same sort of symbol changing may occur within dreams. The dog’s accident may be a dream experience, for that matter, that then changes your conscious symbolic feeling toward dogs in the waking state. One person may symbolize fear as a demon, as an unfriendly animal, or even as some perfectly simple ordinarily harmless object; but if you know what your own symbols mean, then you can use the knowledge not only to interpret your dreams but also as signposts to the state of consciousness in which they usually occur.

Beyond this are states in which the symbols themselves begin to fade away, become indistinct, distant. Here you begin to draw into regions of consciousness in which symbols become less and less necessary, and it is a largely unpopulated area indeed. [...] In this stage of consciousness the soul finds itself alone with its own feelings, stripped of symbolism and representations, and begins to perceive the gigantic reality of its own knowing.

[...] 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.

The houses or apartments will always be different, and yet the symbol is always a signpost that he has reached a particular point of consciousness, and is ready to enter another state of consciousness. Each of you will have certain symbols that serve the same kind of purpose, highly individual to you. Unless you make an effort at self-exploration, however, these symbolic guideposts will make no conscious sense.

(10:36.) Some such symbols stay with you for life. Some in periods of great change may also alter their character, bringing forth a certain feeling of disorientation as these unconsciously familiar symbols undergo transformation. [...] A dog may be a symbol to you of natural joy, for example, or of freedom. [...]

[...] In a strange manner, symbols can be regarded as samples of the way you perceive at various levels of consciousness. [...] 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.

[...] 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.

[...] 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.