“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This morning I quit painting at 11 AM to go to the bank and the stationery store. When I got home at 11:45 I washed several windows at Jane’s request; they certainly needed it. As I finished the job I felt the onset of another “attack” of chest discomfort; it lasted throughout the afternoon, and was most uncomfortable. The same old panicky feelings. I was very upset and angry with myself. The pendulum told me my situation was related to the fact that I stopped painting early, the windows, my worries about Jane, my age—the whole bit, in other words, so that I ended up thinking I’d accomplished precious little over the years. Certainly my learning was deficient, I thought. I simply wanted to help Jane, live quietly, and paint with some kind of passion I’d always envisioned but never achieved. So why all the other hash in life, I wondered? All of those other things seemed to get in the way of the few things I really wanted to do, including writing. With the writing I sought to make sense of everything at least intellectually, but for the moment at least, I thought, this left untouched what seemed to be the more powerful emotional tangle of beliefs.

(Jane said she’d have a session for me after supper. I replied that it didn’t seem to matter. I was still uncomfortable at session time, still wondering whether my feelings were physical or emotionally based, though somewhat better too. At nap time I’d had a very vivid dream in which I was driving a new blue pickup truck down a hill. I had an accident of some sort that left the truck half hanging off the road over a steep drop to the valley below; I had a view of this from below. No one else was involved in the accident, though, and the truck did stay on the road. As it happened I woke up with a start, feeling at first what I thought was a spasm in my chest, but quickly realized it was a part of my dream reaction. Mixed in here somehow were thoughts I’d been entertaining today about glazing the underpainting for a head I’d done in green a couple of weeks ago. I’d wanted to work on it this morning but had postponed doing so until tomorrow, so I could quit painting early this morning. Strangely, the spasm episode in the dream involved the color effects I knew I’d get when I glazed the painting: I was vividly aware of the texture of the underpainting as the green color was altered into flesh color by the overlay of warm flesh colors in oil.

(Jane was once more very relaxed as session time approached. “You’ll be lucky to get a session out of me,” she laughed, but at the same time she felt Seth around. Then whispering:)

The body consciousness must react to your (underlined) interpretation of an exterior stimulus as well. The body consciousness, for example, will react quite differently to, say, two slaps of exactly the same pressure—one an energetic love slap, and the other one delivered in ridicule or anger. The physical stimulus itself, however, would be precisely the same, but the body would react to your understanding of that stimulus.

The slap could bring pleasure or pain. In its moment-to-moment reactions, the body consciousness is, you might say, “literal-minded.” It reacts literally, say, in that regard, to symbols. The symbols are the realm in which interpretations are made, but the body must always react moment by moment at that level of activity, irregardless of a vast knowledge of probabilities.

Almost all such instances (underlined) involve thoughts nearly conscious, conscious, or just below consciousness, in which you have projected imagined unfortunate situations into the future. The body senses your fear, looks for the source in the immediate environment of the moment so that it can suitably react to protect you—but it senses no immediate difficulty. Naturally it becomes anxious.

Men have always grown old—and women too (amused)—but they often displayed far greater wisdom, health, and even vitality in old age because it was expected of them, and because they expected it of themselves. It is a matter of understanding the process—not of blaming yourself for reactions you do not approve of.

I am not talking about imagining that you are younger than you are, but of being the self that you are, as you always have been despite whatever age you were. There were a few good points here thrown in (humorously) of general interest, regarding the interpretation of suffering. I hope you noticed.

Many appearances make those statements look evidential but they are only evidential in that they show the power of beliefs and suggestion. Understanding that, you see, can really give you greater leeway, for while you might still recognize such beliefs in yourself at times, you will also be able to recognize their source—and by doing so automatically confound them.

(10:00 PM. Jane’s pace had been fast and steady. I think she’s done a remarkable job of keeping her own equilibrium during my own troubles with the “Leonard affair.” She agreed. I was still upset with myself, however. The business involving Leonard is the only major event that’s penetrated my own attempts to concentrate in the moment, since I embarked upon that endeavor some weeks ago. I’d thought I was doing fairly well there, but evidently Leonard represents a host of old fears that rose up en masse when triggered, and caught me unprepared. But my learning seems terribly slow and ineffectual.)