“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

At the same time dreams have their startling qualities, promoting the insertion of unexpected developments, in which case they appear to deal with the breaking down of conserving principles. In this fashion they also mirror your more exterior behavior, conserving what you know already, and yet introducing new patterns, new spontaneous orders that would sometimes seem to run against conservative issues. They reinforce the past, for example, when you dream of past situations. They also seem to undermine the integrity of the past by showing it to you in an unfamiliar light, mixing it with present and future tints.

Sometimes there is / no reply at all, as if /
my voice itself / turns into mist / or is lost in /
the waves pounding / until it seems / I am indeed /
abandoned, / separated from / some forgotten self /
who has gone elsewhere / without me, / so that the gulf /
between us / is so distant / that messages sent back /
and forth / now take so long / to reach me /
that only future / generations / of myself /
would be here to / catch their meaning.

Little by little / my strength arouses. / My muscles unravel /
which have been / folded tight, / saved for future use, /
and I sit up now / running brittle fingers /
through my sun-dried hair. / I say, “We went too far /
my friend. / From now on we’ll / have to go together /
just out as far as I can / walk or swim—or I’ll go /
mind-traveling with you. / But I won’t stay home /
alone again, / appliances turned down / halfway, waiting.”

Very briefly: More so than Jane is, I think, I’m intrigued by and susceptible to nostalgia. I create a feeling for it. I used to equate the emotion with sentimentality—but leaving aside the basic merits of the latter, I’ve come to understand that nostalgia, growing out of its inevitable counterpart, memory, represents a facet of Seth’s idea of simultaneous time. For if past, present and future exist together (and continue to develop), then I see nostalgia as expressing a legitimate searching by the conscious mind as it seeks to grasp that the past exists now, and is not “dead.” The quest for nostalgia is one way to bring the living past up-to-date. The yearning I feel each time I drive past the apartment house Jane and I lived in for 15 years, just west of the business section of Elmira, represents my conscious reunification of the past with the present, and even a projection of both into the future in ordinary terms.