“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

It brings to the surface some other physical feelings, however, that are connected with the usual symptoms. He is meant to see the connection. The sinuses are involved. The feeling of being full through the body—heavy—has a connection with the full-head feeling, initially, of sinus origin physically.

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.

(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.

He was earlier afraid, you see, that his symptoms otherwise had become so real to others that they would continue to perceive them. In other words for a test case he produced a miniature symbolic situation physically materialized. Solving it is meant to give him the confidence that it can be done in this other area.

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.

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.