It seems to you that without symbols there would be nonbeing

[inavalan]

• "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 deductions 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."
  
  
• —SS Part Two: Chapter 18: Session 571, March 3, 1971

I experience such a house with multiple levels, rooms, doors, almost every time I go to sleep in the first 15 or 30 minutes.