“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This is the last part of the 627th session. Seth called for a break for Jane at 10:30 because she had been coughing rather steadily for some time. This was an interruption of the material on Chapter Six of Seth’s book, but as long as a break had occurred I suggested Seth say something about Jane’s cold. She’d had it for perhaps six weeks—since, I thought, we had visited my mother and brother in Rochester, NY. I was puzzled that it was lingering so long.)

Now. He is working with beliefs, juggling them. The cold symptoms began some time ago, and have been kept while he makes up his mind to dispense with the more familiar ones. The cold does not involve physical slow motion.

When he began clamping down on physical spontaneity, tensing of the head, neck and jaw areas was involved, leading to a sinus condition. The cold is meant to lead him backward mentally and physically through the group of beliefs that initially cause the entire condition.

The cold symptoms however also lead to a certain feeling of fluidity rather than dryness, which is in itself evocative of motion.

The cold symptoms also have operated to increase his circulation. The body combating the (in quotes) “new” symptoms is also creating antibodies that affect the old symptoms. He has had a better appetite. The body has been calling for more food and nourishment, and quite unconsciously he has been consuming a larger amount of peanut butter, which is giving him several nutriments that he needs.

The fact is of course that he doesn’t need any of the symptoms, but in the interrelationship of his beliefs the cold results as a method of understanding, and of bringing about certain necessary physical changes.

It began—the cold—after Eleanor (Friede) showed such pleasure with (Jane’s autobiography) Rich Bed.

(Eleanor’s letter about this is dated October 4, 1972. We were in Rochester October 6—8, 1972.) In Ruburt’s past a cold was the one quite acceptable symptom in childhood of escape, for example.

Intuitively he began to understand the physical connections between that kind of cold and sinus involvement, and his condition. (Gestures to include the whole body.) A cold is something that comes and goes, and is not permanent, and he is to see his other symptoms in that same light—not as he saw them earlier, as a permanent-like situation.

He quite understands how in childhood he adopted colds and discarded them, and is to see then the other symptoms in the same light. For these reasons the cold was adopted. He needed to see how he himself in a relatively harmless (underlined) incident in miniature, so to speak, could create such conditions as the cold, and in growing out of it see how he can grow out of the other symptoms.

The public, or the people, have also been involved in this test case. He needed to know that people saw and recognized the symptoms of a cold so that when he was rid of it he could see for himself that they no longer perceived those symptoms in him.

The cold, beyond that, is also symbolic in that his bout with the other symptoms had to do to some degree with being out in the cold—out of it.

Rich Bed is highly important to him personally and creatively. He would feel out in the cold no longer for several reasons, mainly because the book so beautifully combined the continuity of his earlier life with his later activities.

Now out in the cold also means that you are stiff. The antibodies produced by the cold symptoms result in a body activity that has produced some fever—but a benign one that warms him up and increases circulation.

The cold for example is also bringing in particular an increased blood flow through the head and neck area, and also to the extremities. Certain stresses have been relieved physically. Bodily the cold creates a diversionary tactic—still a stress situation, but an impermanent one that changes momentarily the hormonal output.

It represents then alterations of beliefs toward a more beneficial condition. At one other time such a situation was set up. The cold’s duration was far briefer, through very intense, but his overall condition was better then.

Then the cold did serve to drastically improve his health. Because he did not understand the nature of his beliefs however the improvement, while lasting for some time, deteriorated. This time the body’s overall condition, using the method adopted, required a longer period of such stress-transformation, and so the cold condition has been of longer duration.