“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Considering Rob’s and my relationship — the challenges, joys, hopes, strains and our own personality characteristics. Maybe the whole thing is — reacting to ourselves individually and to the other person — experiencing our own personal reactions and then reacting to them — then reacting to the other person who experiences the same processes in himself. We … creatively keep altering ourselves and our mates. We can’t be ‘perfect’ at the start because the processes include changing events. There’s bound to be some lopsidedness to our growth, as we form psychological ‘art’ throughout our entire lives — or learn to live … artistically. Each person in such a relationship changes constantly in relationship to himself and the other person, until — hopefully? — by death you’ve used the characteristics of your own personality the best you can. Merged them with your mate’s so that between the two of you, you get a new creative mixture in a kind of psychological multiplication … You try different ways of using your own traits, etc.

Seth remarked many times that each person sends out invisible signals of need and desire that are picked up and reacted to by those who have similar challenges. In our own case, Jane and I were always acutely aware of the difficult personal working-out of the interchanges that followed our getting together. Here are her rough notes for September 29, 1976, just as she wrote them in her journal.

Neither should the ego react so violently that it remembers and reacts to past storms in the midst of clear and sunny weather. [...]

[...] The tree lives through its inner senses, experiencing many sensations and reacting to many stimuli of which you are unaware. [...]

When man’s ego turns instead into a shell — when instead of interpreting outside conditions, it reacts too violently against them, then it hardens and becomes an imprisoning form that begins to snuff out important data and to keep enlarging information from the inner self. [...]

[...] This is what the ego does when it reacts too violently to purely physical data. [...]

“You knew I’d react this way!” I said. [...]

(In an earlier session, Seth said that while on vacation in Maine, we both unwittingly created two images — versions of ourselves — and then reacted to them. [...]