“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.

Dreams often serve as the frameworks in which sudden remarkable insights appear that later enable a man or a woman to envision the world in a way that was not earlier predictable. The world’s activities always include the insertion of surprising events. This is true at all levels of nature, from microscopic to macroscopic. As I have said before, all systems are open. The theories of both evolutionists and creationists strongly suggest and reinforce beliefs in the consecutive nature of time, and in a universe that begins in such-and-such a fashion, continuing on to such-and-such an end—but there are horizontal events that appear in the true activity of nature, and there are horizontal entry points and exit points in all experience. These allow for the insertion of unofficial new energy, the introduction of surprising events. Period.

8. Our four visitors had become our dear friends long ago. I was sure that, by arriving just when they did, they contributed much to Jane’s latest improvements. They offered enthusiasm and faith and reinforcement to both of us, and renewed in us a fine nostalgia for old, seemingly more innocent times—even though all of us knew that that was illusory: Basically, those class days, those class years, couldn’t have been any more innocent than any other times; it was just that hindsight helped!

When I look up at those three high, old-fashioned bay windows that illuminate the living room of Apartment 4, on the second floor of that house, I visualize Jane sitting behind them at her oak table, thinking and writing, intrigued and comforted by the busy patterns of people and automobiles traversing the intersection she looks down upon: Walnut and West Water Streets. And behind those windows, at night in that living room, she paces back and forth for hours at a time after she begins to speak for Seth in December 1963. She holds ESP classes there. Accordingly, then, a Jane Roberts Butts and a Robert F. Butts live in that apartment I’m creating. I think my nostalgia for those days reinforces our activities in larger realms of consciousness, as well as in our “present” joint reality, in which my wife is now chair-bound.