Session 651

Personal Reality, Session 651

Your beliefs about age, like everything else, will form your experience, and your mass beliefs will affect your civilization.  With the current concepts held by your society, men and women fear old age from the time of youth.  If young adulthood is considered the epitome of life, blessedness, and success, then old age is viewed as the opposite – a time of failure and decay.

Some of this has to do with distorted ideas of both the conscious and unconscious minds, using your terms now.  Generally speaking, in Western society the conscious mind is seen as coming into its own in early adulthood, as the self rises from the bed of childhood unconsciousness into its critical awareness and differentiation.  The appreciation of distinctions and differences is considered one of the greatest characteristics of consciousness, and so those aspects of it are valued.  On the other hand the equally significant assimilating, combining, correlating characteristics of consciousness are overlooked.  In scholarly circles, and many that are not scholarly at all, the intellect is equated only with the critical faculties, so that the more diagnostic you are the more intellectual you are considered.

During Western years of adulthood, consciousness is focused most intently in one specific area of activity and physical manipulation.  From childhood, the mind is trained to use its argumentative, separating qualities above all others.  Creativity is allowed to flow only through certain highly limited, accepted channels.

When an individual becomes older – and retired, for example – the focus for that particular kind of concentration is no longer so immediately available.  The mind actually becomes more itself, freer to use more of its abilities, allowed to stray from restricted areas, to assimilate, acknowledge and create.

Precisely at this time however the individual is told to beware of any such straying, and to consider that kind of behavior a symptom of mental deterioration.  Those following mass beliefs will find that their own image of themselves has changed.  They fear that their very age, or existence in time, has betrayed them.  They see themselves as leftovers, dim vestiges of better selves, and in their own system of value judgment they condemn themselves through the very fact of their continued existence in time.  If they ever did, they no longer trust the integrity of their bodies.  They begin to act out the drama in a script written by others – to which, however, they have acquiesced.

It may not seem that there is any connection between that situation and your beliefs involving color, and yet the two are intimately associated.

You equate the color white with brilliant consciousness, good, and youth, and the color black with the unconscious, old age and death.

In this value system the black races are feared, as, basically, the aged are feared.  The blacks are considered the primitives.  To them are assigned creative musical abilities, for example, but for a long time these were “underground” activities.  They gave birth to acceptable musical productions but were not admitted themselves into the concert halls of the respectable nation.

In your society therefore the black race has represented what you think of as the chaotic, primitive, spontaneous, savage, unconscious portions of the self, the underside of the “proper American citizen”.

The blacks were to be oppressed then on the one hand, and yet treated indulgently as children on the other.  There was always a great fear that the blacks as a race would escape their bounds – given an inch they would take a yard – simply because the whites so greatly feared the nature of the inner self, and recognized the power that they tried so desperately to strangle within themselves.

Nations, like individuals, can have split personalities at times.  So there was a give-and-take involved in which the blacks expressed certain tendencies for the country as a whole, while the whites expressed other characteristics.

Both groups acquiesced to their roles.  In larger terms, of course, each has belonged to other races in other times and places; or to be more accurate, in simultaneous existences one plays out the other’s role.

Applied to old age, the color black denotes a returning to those unconscious forces.  Now all of this so far is from the standpoint of American and Western belief.  It is simply the reality in which many of my readers are involved.  In other “underground” systems of belief, however, black is seen as a symbol of great knowledge, power and strength.  When this is carried to an extreme you wind up with devil cults, in which the poorly understood powers of creativity and exuberance rush out in distorted form; the undersides of consciousness are then glorified at the expense of the other, white, “conscious and objective” values.

Yet in both of these systems the old are denied their unique power, strength and wisdom, and hence the civilization is robbed as well as the individuals within it.

All of this is also connected with your beliefs about the waking and dreaming states, white being acquainted with the day, and black with the dreaming condition.  Here again is the old connection between the God of Light and the Prince of Darkness, or Satan – all distinctions made at various levels of development, and having to do with the nature of the origin of the present consciousness.

Through the ages, again, underground philosophies have tried to combine the two concepts, usually going from one extreme to the other in combating the current ideas in historical terms.  In some of these philosophies the daylight is seen as pallid, for example, in comparison with the true brilliance of knowledge that illuminates the dream state, and black is the symbol then of secret knowledge that cannot be found with normal consciousness, or be scrutinized in the light of day.

Here you find stories of black magicians; and, once more, age enters in so that the legends of the wise old man or woman rise into folklore.  Death is viewed in terms of value judgments of good and evil and black and white – the annihilation of consciousness being perceived as black, and its resurrection as white.

The light of illumination is experienced as white, yet it often appears to delineate the darkness of the soul, or to shine in the black of night.  So in your terms of reference the two are dependent one upon the other, changing their connotations according to your beliefs.

In many ancient civilizations, the night with its blackness was revered, and the secrets of nighttime consciousness explored.  Correlations were made in which such knowledge was used consciously in the daytime.  The two seemingly separate aspects of consciousness merged, and there were flowerings of art and civilization that are, in your terms now, almost impossible to conceive.  And in such civilizations all races were accorded their place, joyfully, and those of all ages were respected for their particular contributions.

In such societies the limited value judgments discussed in this chapter did not apply.  Individuals – or races – did not have to take certain specific roles, acting out various portions of humanity’s characteristics; each person was allowed to be unique, with all that that implies.

This does not mean that humanity has fallen from that state of grace into what may seem to be a lower condition.  It does mean that you have chosen to diversify functions and abilities, to isolate them, so to speak, in order to learn and understand and even to develop their peculiar natures.

There are ways of assimilating your inner knowledge, your contrasting values of light and darkness, good and bad, youth and old age, and of using such criteria to enrich your own experience in a most practical fashion.  In so doing you will enhance not only yourself and your society, but the world at large.  You will also recognize the state of grace in which you must exist.  Let us look as some of those ways.

An attempt must be made to correlate seemingly diverse aspects of experience, to combine ideas of light and dark, consciousness and unconsciousness, and so forth, not only in private but mass experience.

As mentioned in Seth Speaks, my earlier book, great distinctions are made between waking and sleeping states.  (See the 532^nd session in Chapter Eight of that book.)  They are neatly divided, with little effort really made to relate the two.  Many of you will not find it practical to alter your sleeping hours because of work commitments.  Some of you will be able to do so, however, and those of you who are really interested in this endeavor can at least achieve some variation, on occasion, that will allow you to connect your sleeping and waking activities with far greater effectiveness.

Those of you who are able will discover that a somewhat altered arrangement will work greatly to your advantage.  I suggest a six-hour sleeping block of time at one session, and no more.  If you still feel the need for a greater amount of rest, then a two-hour-at-the-most nap can be added.

Many will find that a five-hour steady sleeping period is quite sufficient, with a nap as required.  A four-hour block is ideal, however, reinforced by whatever nap feels natural.

In such circumstances, there are not the great artificial divisions created between the two states of consciousness.  The conscious mind is better able to remember and assimilate its dreaming experience, and in dreams the self can use its waking experience more efficiently.

Often in the aged you find such frameworks coming into being naturally, but those who awaken spontaneously after four hours consider themselves insomniacs because of their beliefs, and so cannot utilize their experience properly.  Both the conscious and unconscious would operate far more effectively, however, under an abbreviated sleeping program, and for those involved in “creative” endeavors this kind of schedule would bring greater intuition and applied knowledge.

Individuals following such natural behavior would feel much greater stability in themselves.  Within the general patterns I have mentioned, each will, of course, find his or her own particular rhythm, and some experimentation might be necessary until you learn the maximum balance.  But the flow of vitality would be heightened.

It is true that the patterns will have their own flow at certain points in your life.  Following your own rhythm, longer or shorter periods will naturally ensue.  Your consciousness as you think of it will be expanded through such practices.  Generally speaking, eight-hour sleep periods, or longer ones, are not beneficial, nor in larger terms are they natural for the race.

There is a give-and-take chemical reaction, or rather chemical rhythms of reactions, that are far more effective in the shorter sleep periods.  Many of you sleep through periods that should be those of your greatest creativity and alertness, in which the conscious and unconscious are most beautifully focused and at one.  The conscious mind is often drugged with sleep just when it could be deriving its greatest benefits from the unconscious, and be able to poise most meaningfully in the reality that you know.  In these instances the beauty and illumination of your dream state can be clear in the conscious mind, and used to enrich your physical life.  Contrasts in your experience will appear to you in their united clarity.