“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To some extent this transmutation of symbol can be observed in various stages of waking consciousness also. When you are at rest, awake but with eyes closed, images and pictures will often appear to your inner eye. Some will be physical-like materializations, images of trees or houses or people. Others will be simply shapes that change swiftly and seem to flow one into the other. As a rule, even the images that are recognizable will quickly be replaced by others in a kaleidoscope of constantly changing forms.

(9:57.) Through the use of symbols, however, your feelings would be given full play, each image rising and falling in flow with feelings so far underneath consciousness — pools of emotion — that you were not aware of them. They would automatically bring about these images however. Now with reflection you could connect these with their origin, but usually they would pass you by.

Still, to the unconscious the problem has been set and given. In the following deep protected areas of sleep, the higher centers of the inner self are allowed to function and come to the aid of the three-dimensionally oriented portion of the personality. This more liberated self sees the situation much more clearly, suggests a given line of action (but does not order it), and informs the dreaming self. The dreaming self then manufactures a group of dreams in which the solution is stated within a symbolic dream situation.

Now even as you go about your day, your consciousness fluctuates, and you can catch yourself “symbolizing” in these different ways if you get in the habit of observing but not interpreting the state of your mind. Each physical event that has happened to you is filed away within your psyche as a definite group of symbols. These do not represent the experience, they contain the experience. These represent your personal symbol bank as far as your present life is concerned.

(Pause at 10:20.) There is a great unity between your daytime symbols and your dreaming ones. In a miraculous shorthand, many symbols carry the burden of far more than one experience, of course, and one symbol will therefore evoke not only one given experience, but similar ones. Personal association, therefore, is highly involved with your personal bank of symbols, and it operates in the dream states precisely as in waking life — but with greater freedom, and drawing from the future, in your terms, as well as from the past.

Therefore, you have greater use of symbolism in the dream state, for you are aware of past and future symbols. These vary in intensity; often they cluster together. Such multidimensional symbols will appear then in many ways, not simply visually. They will affect not only your own physical reality, but all realities in which you are involved. In a manner of speaking the symbols that you know are but the tail end of greater symbols.

The eye-opening activates the inner mechanism. If there is something wrong physically with the eyes, if they are blind for example, then that particular mechanism is not activated at that time. The personality may have chosen to be born blind for his own reasons. If those reasons change, or if inner psychic developments occur, (pause) then the physical eyes will be healed and the inner mechanism activated. There are endless varieties of behavior along these lines. The inner banks of symbols, however, operate as a drawing account, latent unless you take advantage of them. You think before you learn language, as I mentioned earlier in this book, but you already have at your psychic fingertips past experiences from other lifetimes to guide you.

Sound is itself a symbol. You understand that from a given point of silence, sound begins and grows louder. What you do not understand is that from that given point of silence, which is your point of non-perception, sounds also begin that grow deeper and deeper into silence, yet still have meaning and as much variety as the sounds that you know, and these are also symbols. The thought unspoken has a “sound” that you do not hear, but that is very audible at another level of reality and perception.