“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.

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.

Ideas of course are highly important, for they are a part of your interpretation of the world, of personal events, and they are a part of the symbolizing process. The body consciousness is geared for action, vitality, growth, curiosity, excitement, whether it be mental or physical. If there is a large body of beliefs, however, that dampen those bodily purposes, that encourage timidity rather than courage, promote fear rather than faith, then you run into difficulty—particularly if the grounds for those beliefs are not present in any given moment.

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.

Ruburt has been doing very well. Despite the circumstances of the last week or so, because he is trying to relate to the moment as it exists. The two of you can do that. It is a matter, again, of understanding the process. Otherwise, you are using suggestion in a very poor way. The whole idea of the body’s wearing down, as that is understood in your society, is based upon the idea of the body’s mechanistic model: energy is given at birth, and gradually wears down.

Your dream also was a picture of your fears. Returning yourself to the present moment, and responding only to what is within your present environment, returns your body to a state of stability, where it is not crowded by imaginary fears of the future.

(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.)