Saturday, March 10, 2007

Essence/Soul

The first psychiatric patient I diagnosed as multiple showed me what happens when one dissociates before age six. She had a dissociated Essence (split off soul), who called me on the phone to offer her help in the lady’s therapy. I accepted her offer and came to call this bright, all knowing entity her Inner Self Helper or ISH. She became my co-therapist. Unfortunately she and her husband soon moved to Texas, so I never completed therapy with her.
But she was the subject of my first professional published paper and introduced me to the subject of how the mind is composed of two “parts,” the Essence (a.k.a. soul or spirit) and the Personality (a.k.a. Ego). Plato and Aristotle called them the Rational Soul and the Irrational Soul. They are also called the Intellectual Self and the Emotional Self.
In one of those multiples in Santa Cruz, I also met the “supervisors” of the Essences, whom I came to call the CIE for Celestial Intelligent Energy. These psychic beings claimed to have come from another universe, which is coexistent with ours. I decided to call our universe Physicalspace and theirs Thoughtspace. Thoughtspace has no time or distance. Physicalspace has four dimensions, including time. I met the three CIE when they borrowed the body of my most exotic multiple in Santa Cruz, Elise in “Minds In Many Pieces.”. They called themselves Faith, Hope and Charity, and the greatest of these was Charity. She became my primary spiritual teacher over the next several decades.

When I moved to Yolo County, I met a multiple, Marie, who is the subject of “Memories of an Essence.” The reason I chose that title is that all her life history in the book was supplied by Becky, her dissociated Essence. Becky was Marie’s memory manager. During that time, Charity asked me to spread the word. And what was that word? I asked her. She said, “Tell everyone that they have an Essence, and that they should listen to it.” That is the basic commandment from Thoughtspace. We all have inside us an Essence or soul, and it is trying to tell us the best way to behave in our complicated society. If we will listen to it, we will do better than if we let our emotions guide our actions.

First I had to do that for myself, which was no easy task. That story is in the last manuscript, “Michael, My Essence.” There I tell how an Essence comes to be and what it does and can do in our lives.