Seth Speaks, Session 572

Seth Speaks, Session 572

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.

The images that you see in this circumstance represent the thoughts and feelings experienced just before you closed your eyes, or those that were paramount in your mind somewhat previously.  The minute your eyes are closed, the thoughts and feelings express themselves through this symbolism.  Because the images may seem to have no direct connection logically to these thoughts and feelings, you do not recognize them either as your own, nor are you able to tie them up with what they represent.

I am putting this rather simply here.  Imaginatively you have greater freedom to express feelings than you do practically.  An earlier particular fear felt during the day involving, say, a loss of a job may then be translated when you close your eyes into a series of unrelated symbols, all however connected to that one fear.

You may see in a quick series of pictures a deep hole in the ground.  It may be replaced by a street urchin, obviously poor and from another century.  A casket may appear, or a black wallet fly through the air.  You may see a severe, dark, wintry scene.  The picture of a character from an old book long forgotten may appear and disappear.  In between may be a grouping of opposing symbols, representing your hope – a spring flower, a table loaded with food, a new suit of clothes, any sign of abundance that would have meaning to you.  Nowhere would the thought of the potential loss of a job enter in.  It would seem to you that you had forgotten it.

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.

If you let yourself lie still longer with eyes closed, the symbolism would continue to change character, losing perhaps some of its visual characteristics and growing more intense in other directions.  You might think you smell a particular odor, for example, that is distasteful to you (following through with the situation as given).  You might, instead, translate the fear into a frightening physical sensation, and suddenly feel that you are falling, or that something unpleasant touched you.

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.

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 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.

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.

To some extent the more precise a symbol is, the less meaning it can contain.  In the most important dream work, done in the deep protected sleep periods, the symbols are powerful enough and yet condensed enough so that they can be broken down, used in a series of seemingly unrelated dreams as connectives, retain their original strength and still appear in different guises, becoming in each succeeding dream layer more and more specific.

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.

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 a 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.

When I referred to your personal bank of symbols, I meant to specify that this bank was yours from the day of your birth and before.  It contained the symbols of your past existences in your terms (and in your terms, you add to it in this life).  This bank of symbols must be activated however.  For example, you have visual images when you are born, internal visual images, symbols that are activated the moment you open your eyes for the first time.  These serve you as learning mechanisms.  You keep trying to utilize your eyes properly until exterior images conform with the inner patterns.  This is extremely important, and not understood by your scientists.

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, then the physical eyes will be healed and the inner mechanisms 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.

Those who are born into the same nationality, say twice consecutively, learn to speak much quicker the second time around.  Some infants will think in the language of a past life before the new language is learned.  All of this has to do with the use of symbols.

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.

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.