“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.

There may seem to you to be no logic to these inner pictures, and certainly no connection between them and what you were thinking a moment before, or even an hour before. To some extent they seem disconnected from you and not of your doing. Often, however, they represent the characteristics shown by consciousness when it is somewhat turned away from physical stimuli. The form of symbols is changed as the states of consciousness change.

(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.

Any of these changing characteristics of symbols should alert you to the altered state of your consciousness. If you let yourself drift off into sleep here, you would most probably manufacture two or three dreams that symbolized the fear, dreams in which you consider and try out possible solutions within the dream context. The job situation might never appear as such within any of the dreams, of course.

(10:11.) The final and more specific interpretation is done in areas of dreaming closer to the waking self, when the symbols grow more and more specific. There is a much more narrow aspect to symbolism, therefore: The closer you get to waking consciousness, the more limited and narrow the symbol. The handier it is in a given physical circumstance, the less valuable it is as a waking lifetime characteristic symbol.

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.

(11:00.) Trees as they stand are a sound that, again, you do not perceive. In your dreams and particularly beyond those dreams that you recall, are areas of consciousness in which these sounds are automatically perceived and translated into visual images. They operate as a sort of shorthand. Given certain sounds, you could recreate your universe as you know it unconsciously, and any one multidimensional symbol can contain all the reality that you know. End of dictation. (Pause.) Now a few remarks.