“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The symbols can come together or fly apart, can be perceived separately or as a unity. As each event has its own symbol for you, so you have your characteristic way of combining these. These symbols can be translated and perceived in many terms; as a series of notes for example, as a combination of senses, as a series of images. At various stages of consciousness you will perceive the symbols in different terms. The multidimensional symbol in its entirety, then, has a reality in other states of consciousness, but also at other levels of reality entirely.

I am not saying that, nor implying it in the case just mentioned. In your system you have a direct hand in the formation of physical reality. Your natural given data is the result of individual, mass, and collective thoughts, feelings, and emotions, materialized. Your system in this respect is more creative than the systems just mentioned. On the other hand, within these other systems there is a strong innovative group consciousness developing, in which identity is retained but greater inner play allowed between individuals, a large creative interchange of symbol-pools, a drawing upon mental and psychic symbols with greater facility. Because of this, these individuals recognize more clearly the connection between creative images and given sense data. They purposely alter and change their given sense data, and experiment with it.

(Pause at 10:00.) All of this involves a working with symbols in a most intimate manner. At certain levels of your personality you are aware of all the different ways in which symbols are used, not only in your system but in others. As mentioned earlier, no system of reality is closed. Your thoughts and images and feelings therefore alter the given sense data in some other systems.

The innovative patterns developed in those systems, however, can be to some extent perceived within your own. There are constant bleed-throughs. In your various stages of consciousness you pass through areas that can be correlated with many of these systems. Some stages through which you pass are native stages to other kinds of consciousness, and while passing through these you will find yourself using symbols in the way that is characteristic of that level.

Now: Symbols should be fluid, ever-changing in their form. Some can be used as casements to house original experiences, as methods of deception therefore rather than illumination. When this happens fear is always involved.

Fear taken into the various stages of consciousness acts as a distorting lens, hiding the natural dimensions of all symbols, acting as a barrier and as an impediment to free flow. Symbols of an explosive nature serve as releasing agents, setting loose that which has been encased. Without physical storms you would all go insane.

The aggressive nature of symbols is little understood, nor the relationship between aggression and creativity. These are far from opposing characteristics, and without an aggressive thrust, symbols would lack their high mobility. They would exist in a permanent kind of environment.

It is both the creative and aggressive aspects of consciousness that allow it to use symbols, to move through various levels of experience, and the aggressive nature of thought that so propels it, despite your knowledge, into realities that you do not understand.

Aggressiveness and passivity are both behind symbols of birth, for both are needed. They are both beneath symbols of death, though this is not understood. Inertia results when aggressiveness and creativity are not in the proper proportions, when consciousness leans too severely in one direction or another, when the flow of symbols is either too quick or too slow for the particular psychological environment in which you dwell.

(10:32.) Pauses then occur. To put it as simply as possible, there is an almost inconceivable moment in which a no-reality occurs, in which a symbol is caught between motion and no motion, a time of uncertainty. This is of course translated in many ways, and reflected. In such periods, certain symbols can be lost to all intents and purposes, dropping out of an individual’s experience, leaving gaps of inertia.

These gaps exist quite literally in many systems. You encounter them on many levels. You may find yourself experiencing a state of consciousness, for example, in which nothing seems to happen, and no psychological landscape or recognizable symbols occur. These exist not only psychologically or psychically, but as blank areas in terms of space. The spaces may be filled finally with new symbols. If you are perceptive enough, you can sometimes catch yourselves encountering such states of reality in which nothing appears and no signs of any consciousness outside of your own is apparent.

Such blank spots can be seeded with new symbols, and are often used as channels through which new creative ideas and inventions are inserted. These gaps are recognized by others, therefore, and viewed as dark spaces. They also represent areas of no resistance for those mind-travelers who are probing inner realities. They represent uncluttered areas, but also open channels, inactive in themselves but passively waiting. Now some symbols also wait in such a passive manner to be activated.

They represent future experience, in your terms, that presently lies latent. These blank spots of inertia, therefore, are creative to some extent, in that these other symbols may swim into view within them.