Various Stages Of Consciousness, Symbolism, And Multiple Focus

Within your own personality all facets of your consciousness converge, whether or not you are aware of it.

Consciousness can be turned in many directions, obviously, both inward and outward. You are aware of fluctuations in your normal consciousness, and closer atten- tion would make some of this quite clear. You expand or narrow the scope of your attention constantly. You may focus upon one object almost to the exclusion of everything else at times, so that you literally are not conscious of the room in which you sit.

You may be “conscious” and reacting to a remembered event so strongly that you are relatively unaware of present events. You take all of these fluctuations for granted. They do not disturb you. If you are Lost in a book and unaware momentarily of your immediate environment, you are not afraid that it will be gone when you want to turn your attention back to it. Nor in a daydream do you usually worry about returning safely to the present moment.

To some extent, all of these are small examples of the mobility of your consciousness, and the ease with which it can be used. In a strange manner, symbols can be regarded as samples of the way you perceive it various levels of consciousness. Their changing guises can be used as signposts. Fire, for example, is a symbol made physical, so a real fire tells you obviously that you are perceiving reality with your physically attuned consciousness.

A mental picture of a fire automatically tells you that another kind of consciousness is involved. A fire mentally seen that has warmth but does not bum destructively obviously means something else. All symbols are an attempt to express feelings, feelings that can never be expressed adequately through language. Symbols represent the infinite variations of feelings, and in various stages of consciousness these will appear in different terms, but they will always accompany you.

There are several exceptions, however, in which pure knowing or pure feeling is involved without the necessity for symbols. These stages of consciousness are infrequent and seldom translated into normal conscious terms.

Let us take a particular feeling and follow it through as it might be expressed at various levels of consciousness. Begin with a feeling of joy. In normal consciousness, the immediate environment will be perceived in a far different manner than it would be, say, if an individual were in a state of depression. The feeling of joy changes the objects themselves, in that the perceiver sees them in a far brighter light. He creates the objects far more vividly and with greater clarity. In feedback fashion, the environment then seems to reinforce his joy. What he sees, however, is still physical, the objects of the material world. Pretend now that he begins to daydream and falls into a reverie. Into his inner mind come pictures or symbols of material objects, people or events, from perhaps the past as well as present and future imaginings, the joy now being expressed with greater freedom mentally, but with symbols.

The joy stretches out, so to speak, into the future, sheds also its light into the past, and may cover greater areas of expansion than could be shown in physical terms at that moment. Now imagine that our individual from his reverie falls either into a trance state or into a deep sleep. He may see images that are highly symbolic to him of joy or exuberance. Logically there may be little connection between them, but intuitively the connections are clear. He now enters into his mental experiences far more deeply than in the reverie state, and may have a series of dream episodes in which he is able to express his joy and share it with others.

He is still dealing with physically oriented symbols, however. Now since we are using this discussion as a case in point we will continue to follow it even further. He may form images of dream cities or people that are of a very joyful nature, translate the emotion itself into whatever symbols are pertinent to him. An exuberance may be translated into images of playing animals, flying people, or animals or landscapes of great beauty. Again, the logical connections will be lacking, but the entire episode will be connected by this emotion.

The physical body all the while is greatly benefitted, because the beneficial feelings automatically renew and replenish its recuperative abilities. The feelings of joy now may lead to images of Christ, Buddha, or the prophets. These symbols are the changing scenes characteristic of consciousness at various stages. The experiences are to be considered as creations; creative acts all native to consciousness at various stages.

Beyond this are states in which the symbols themselves begin to fade away, become indistinct, distant. Here you begin to draw into regions of consciousness in which symbols become less and less necessary, and it is a largely unpopulated area indeed. Representations blink off and on, and finally disappear. Consciousness is less and less physically oriented. In this stage of consciousness the soul finds itself alone with its own feelings, stripped of symbolism and representations, and begins to perceive the gigantic reality of its own knowing.

It feels direct experience. If we use joy as our example, all mental symbols and images of it would finally disappear. They had emerged from it, and would fall away from it, not being the original experience, but by-products. The soul would then begin to explore the reality of this joy in terms that can hardly be explained, and in so doing would learn methods of perception, expression, and actualization that would have been

utterly incomprehensible to it before.

Physical objects are the most obvious of your symbols, and precisely for that reason you do not realize that they are symbols at all.

At different levels, consciousness works with different kinds of symbols. Symbols are a method of expressing inner reality. Working in one direction the soul, using its consciousness, expresses inner reality through as many symbols as possible, through living, changing symbolism. Each symbol itself then is to its own extent conscious, individual, and aware.

In so doing, the soul continually creates new varieties of inner reality to be explored. Working in the opposite direction, so to speak, the soul divests itself of all symbols, all representations, and using its consciousness in a different way learns to probe its own direct experience. Without symbols to come between it and experience, it perfects itself in a kind of value fulfillment that you presently cannot understand except symbolically.

Now these efforts go on whether you wake or sleep. Once you are aware of these activities, however, it is possible to catch yourself in various stages of consciousness, and even at times to follow your own progress, particularly through dream states. Your body is your most intimate symbol at this point, and again your most obvious.

You will use the idea of a body in most stages of consciousness. When you leave your physical body in any kind of out-of-body experience, you actually leave it in another that is only slightly less Physical. This in turn is “later” discarded for one still less physical, but the idea of the form is so important a symbol that you carry it through all of your religious literature, and stories of hereafter.

At one point it will vanish with the other symbols. Now there was a time, speaking in your terms, before the making of symbols; a time so divorced from your idea of reality that only in the most protected areas of sleep does any memory of it ever return. It seems to you that without symbols there would be nonbeing, but this is a natural enough deduction since you are so symbol-oriented.

Those stages of consciousness that occur after death still all deal with symbols, though there is much greater freedom in their use, and greater understanding of their meaning. But in higher stages of consciousness, the symbols are no longer necessary, and creativity takes place completely without their use.

Obviously you cannot become aware of that stage of consciousness now, but you can keep track of the way symbols appear to you in both waking life and the dream state, and learn to connect them with the feelings they represent. You will learn that certain symbols will appear personally to you at various stages of consciousness, and these can serve as points of recognition in your own explorations. When Ruburt is about to leave his body from the dream state for example, he will often find himself in a strange house or apartment that offers opportunities for exploration.

The houses or apartments will always be different, and yet the symbol is always a signpost that he has reached a particular point of consciousness, and is ready to enter another state of consciousness. Each of you will have certain symbols that serve the same kind of purpose, highly individual to you. Unless you make an effort at self- exploration, however, these symbolic guideposts will make no conscious sense.

Some such symbols stay with you for life. Some in periods of great change may also alter their character, bringing forth a certain feeling of disorientation as these unconsciously familiar symbols undergo transformation. The same sort of thing applies to your physical living. A dog may be a symbol to you of natural joy, for example, or of freedom. After seeing an accident in which a dog is killed, then dogs may mean something entirely different to you.

This of course is obvious, but the same sort of symbol changing may occur within dreams. The dog’s accident may be a dream experience, for that matter, that then changes your conscious symbolic feeling toward dogs in the waking state. One person may symbolize fear as a demon, as an unfriendly animal, or even as some perfectly simple ordinarily harmless object; but if you know what your own symbols mean, then you can use the knowledge not only to interpret your dreams but also as signposts to the state of consciousness in which they usually occur.

These symbols will change, therefore, in various stages of consciousness. Again, the logical sequence is not present, but the intuitive creation will change the symbols much in the way that an artist might change his colors.

All symbols stand for inner realities, therefore, and when you juggle symbols, you are juggling inner realities. Any exterior move that you make is made within the interior environment, within all the interior environments with which you are involved.

Symbols are highly charged psychic particles and that includes physical objects that have strong characteristics of attraction and expansion, that stand for inner realizations and realities that have not been perceived through direct knowing. (By direct knowing here, I mean instant cognition and comprehension, without symbolization.)

Even the symbols, then, at various stages of consciousness will appear differently, some seeking to have stability and permanence as your physical objects, following the principles or root assumptions of corporeal reality, and some changing much more quickly, as in the dream state, these being more immediate and sensitive indicators of feeling. Various states of consciousness seem to have their own environments in which these symbols appear, again, as objects appear in a physical environment.

Seemingly nonstable mental objects appear in the dream environment at certain levels. The symbols follow rules then in both cases. As mentioned earlier, again, the dream universe is as “objective” as the corporeal one. The objects and symbols within it are as faithful representations of dream life as physical objects are of waking life.

The nature of the symbol, therefore, can serve as an indication not only as to your environment but your state of consciousness within it. In normal dreaming within the context of an ordinary dream drama, the objects seem permanent enough to you. You take them for granted. You are still physically oriented. You project upon dream images the symbolism of your waking hours.

In other states of dream consciousness, however, houses may suddenly disappear. A modem building may suddenly replace a shack. A child may turn into a tulip. Now the symbols are obviously behaving in a different manner. In this environment, permanency is not a root assumption. Logical sequence does not apply.

Symbols that behave in this way can be clues to you that you are now at another

stage of consciousness, and within an entirely different interior environment. Expression of feelings and of experiences are not limited to the rigid framework of objects stuck into consecutive moments. Feelings are automatically transformed and expressed in a new, mobile, immediate manner. In a way the tune of consciousness is quicker.

Actualization does not need to wait for hours or days. Experience is free from a time context. In this realm of consciousness an entire book may be written, or one’s life plans thoroughly scrutinized. Your present time is one of many dimensions that help form this particular stage of consciousness. Therefore your past, present and future exist within it, but only as portions of that interior environment. You have to learn your way about, for the states of consciousness and their environment stretch out in their own way as your world stretches out, say, in space. It is not difficult, however, to be aware of yourself in this stage through giving yourself proper suggestions before sleep.

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 seemingly 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 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.

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 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 f speaking the symbols that you know are but the tail end of greater symbols.

Resume dictation. 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 bom 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 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 leam 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.

Physically, smell, sight, and sound are combined together to give you your main sense data and compose your physical senses. At other levels, however, these are

separated. Odors therefore have a visual reality, and, as you know, visual data can also be perceived in terms of other sense perceptions.

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.

You operate as if your thoughts were secret, though you should know by now that they are not. Not only are your thoughts apparent through telepathic communications, for example, but without your conscious awareness they also form what you may call pseudoimages “beneath” the range of physical matter as you normally perceive it in some cases, or “above” this same range.

It is, therefore, as if your thoughts appear within other realities as objects - alive and vital in themselves, growing into other systems as flowers or trees grow up seemingly from nothing within physical reality. These can then be used as the raw material, so to speak, in certain other systems. They are the given “natural data,” the raw material of creativity in the realities that you help seed but do not perceive.

In this manner of speaking, your thoughts then follow laws. Their behavior follows laws, and their activities, that you do not understand, though you call your thoughts your own. They are then manipulated, independently of you, by other kinds of consciousness as ever-changing natural phenomena. The native consciousness within such systems is not aware of the origin of this phenomena, nor of your own reality. They take the evidence that appears to their senses as reality, as most of you do. It would not occur to them that this phenomenon originated outside of their own system.

If I were to make the same statement for example to any of my readers, I would be accused of saying that physical reality was composed of the discards of the universe.

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.

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.

Symbols should be fluid, ever-changing in their form. Some -an 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.

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.