The Role of the Human Essence In the Healing Process By Ralph B. Allison, M.D. PO Box 957 Paso Robles, California 93447-0957 805/237-2665 ralfalison@charter.net Presented at the 22nd Annual International Conference on the Study of Shamanism and Alternate Modes of Healing Santa Sabina Center San Rafael, California September 3-5, 2005 Abstract: Much has been said at these meetings about the effectiveness of one healer or another, and about one treatment or another. We need to recognize the existence in each patients (as well as in the treater) of an Essence (a.k.a. Soul or Spirit) as well as a Personality (a.k.a. Mind or Ego). This paper will endeavor to provide some information as to how the patient's Essence and its spiritual supervisors operate to create human illness and /or injury and how they operate in curing the patient, or letting the patient physically deteriorate. To understand the drama in which healing, or lack thereof, occurs, one must know the cast of characters, so that one can determine which role each one plays. The first character is the human being who is the Identified Patient. But each of us is composed of three parts, body, mind, and spirit, according to the philosophers I agree with. The body is one of those characters, and it is a mighty complicated collection of systems, including the brain, neurohormones, and the immune system. The mind I call the Personality. Its basic content is something immaterial called Consciousness, which I consider to be "intelligent energy." It also has the capacity to exercise Free Will to make decisions which are against its own best interests and in violation of its Life Plan. A Master Life Plan is assigned by The Creator to each Personality before its first incarnation. A portion of that Master Life Plan is the Life Plan of this one incarnation. Because each Personality utilizes neurohormones, such as adrenaline, it can manifest emotions of all kinds. This gives it the means and drive to exercise Free Will to violate its best interests. It also has a gender identity because it uses sex hormones and identifies with its physical body's sexual organs. One other attribute of the Personality is its belief system. Each one of us needs a belief system to function in society, and it seems that each belief system contains within it tests which prove to its believers it is correct. Therefore, all other belief systems have to be incorrect. It is only the Personality which has this socially learned belief system. The spirit I call the Essence. It, too, is composed of "intelligent energy" or Consciousness. It, too, is capable of exercising Free Will to ignore directives of its supervisors. However, since it does not have the capacity to experience emotions, operating without connection to neurohormones, it is less likely to exercise its Free Will. But it can and will do so under certain circumstances. It is the supervisor and mentor of its assigned Personality, which it considers its "Charge." Each Essence used to be a Personality which completed a full series of incarnations itself. Then it was upgraded to be an Essence. This freed it of its connection to sex hormones and neurohormones. Thus it no longer has a gender identity nor the capacity to experience anger, greed, etc. It operates in one of two modes, blissfulness or watchfulness. It is blissful when its Charge is doing well and following her Life Plan, and it is watchful when its Charge is emoting and making bad decisions, thus getting off the path required to complete and fulfill her Life Plan. Other upgrading of the Essence includes being given the ability to communicate in the Original Language with all other Essences and with its supervisory spirits. It also is the life energy, ki, or kundalini of its Charge's body. It has the ability to deal with all bodily disorders because it can control the immune system, as well as production of all hormones. Its control center is in the brain's pineal body, which produces melatonin, which is involved in many important bodily functions, including sleep, pregnancy and response to infections. The Essence also has the ability to create both positive and negative hallucinations for its Charge. When it creates a negative hallucination, the Personality really does not see the rock on the pavement of the parking lot and trips and falls, injuring her back. The Essence can also create a positive hallucination of someone who suddenly shows up to instruct her how to behave when she faces a severe crisis. The Essence knows the Personality's Life Plan and what she needs to do to complete it. It also knows her personality traits completely and what buttons are available for the Essence to push. It also knows what karmic debts she needs to pay back. All these facts are taken into account by the Essence when it decides if and how its Charge should become sick or injured. In the 2002 meeting of this group, I described the supervisors of the Essence, who have asked me to call them Celestial Intelligent Energy or CIE. Religions have called them angels, but they prefer the acronym CIE as a collective name. I have talked to three of them when they borrowed one of the bodies of two of my patients with MPD (multiple personality disorder). They call themselves Faith, Hope and Charity and told me they are CIE assigned by The Creator to monitor the human race. Each can work separately in her area of expertise, but, in a crisis, they combine energies and work as one strong force. Whereas the Personality of most people lives full-time in this material world I call Physicalspace, the Essence travels back and forth between here and what I call Thoughtspace. That is a nonmaterial universe which coexists with Physicalspace, but it lacks time or distance. All residents of Thoughtspace communicate by thought alone, and none have the capacity for emotional expression. Neither do any of them consider themselves male or female. Most interestingly, the CIE who taught me emphasize that there are no rules in Thoughtspace. All decision are made on a case-by-case basis, using the principles of Situational Ethics. Just as there are the CIE of the humans, who were created when The Creator placed the first humans on Earth, there are also CIE assigned to run every other aspect of the universe, including the weather. There are, therefore, CIE of bacteria and CIE of viruses. These CIE communicate with the CIE of the humans to decide which humans shall be infected with which infective agent. All of the CIE take their directions from The Creator, who also created them. In contrast to the nature of Personalities and Essences, The Creator did not give the CIE the capacity to exercise Free Will. Therefore they cannot rebel against The Creator. However my CIE teachers wish to make it clear that they are not robots with The Creator telling each one what to do in all situations. They are given an assignment but are free to use whatever means they think will accomplish their goals. If they need to perform a miracle, then a miracle it will be. They have powerful energies available for which there are no human labels, I am told. For all ailments, these factors must exist: 1. Predisposing features. What condition(s) must the person have to be able to suffer this ailment? The predisposition may be primarily in the bodily structure, which is built according to the DNA coding of the inherited genes. One example is PKU or phenylketonuria, which my brother-in-law has. This was due to his inheriting the same recessive gene from both parents, which gene became dominant when he received one from each parent. The other predisposition relates to karmic debts which need to be paid. 2. Precipitating features. What trigger(s) must be pulled, and by whom, to bring the ailment into existence? 3. Continuing features. Considering the built-in repair mechanism all our bodies have, what must happen to hamper the automatic repair mechanism? One of the CIE of the humans is called the Spiritual Guardian of the Essence. This CIE has the job of putting two people, who should marry and have children together, in the same location. Then the Essence of each one causes them to fall in love with each other and want to mate. In this case, since my brother-in-law's Life Plan included him having PKU, the Spiritual Guardians for his parents had to get them together, make sure they married and bred this son. His Life Plan included his being severely mentally retarded, so he would be taken care of by state hospital nurses all his life, which is exactly what has happened. But his nurses have to understand that his Essence is not retarded or defective in any way, and they can get its cooperation in solving any problem whose solution is essential for his survival. They discovered that when he had a colostomy, and they decided to instruct him in colostomy care as if he were a normal patient. He learned how to take care of his colostomy with no trouble at all, but he still cannot open a door by turning the knob. His colostomy care was needed for personal survival, but there was always a staff member there to turn door knobs for him. This is a man who has an IQ of 10 and no ability to talk in any language. The other hereditary factor is the karmic debt built up by the Personality. In 2000, I talked here about "How Reincarnation Really Works." If one exercises Free Will to cause trouble and hurt others, this karmic debt must be paid back sometime. What goes around comes around. So a serious illness or injury might be needed to be experienced this time around to pay off some of that debt. Now everything I have said about patients with diseases goes for those of us who have spent our lives attempting to heal them. If my Life Plan included being a psychiatrist, then going to college and medical school was the right thing to do. If using shamanic means to treat patients was part of my Life Plan, then those patients with MPD were the best ones to have in front of me, since I had no training in how to treat them appropriately. I could not have helped any of them get better if I had not been advised by my Essence to use shamanic methods. So what are the elements needed for healing of an ailment which is not self-limiting because of our own immune system? 1. Inherited factors are of two kinds. One is the DNA inheritance which is unique to each person. The other is the existence of karmic debts from one's previous lifetimes. 2. The Personality has its belief system. It is well known in medicine that, for any treatment method to work, both the doctor and the patient must believe it will work. If one of them does not, it will not work in that patient. Does the patient believe she is curable, worth curing, or fated to suffer forever? Is she paranoid and "knows" someone else caused her to suffer this way? Does she believe in psychic attack from her enemies? Does she believe a TV evangelist can heal her from his studio to her living room? Does she believe in a certain treater, or in a certain method of treatment? 3. In the opinion of the Essence, will its Charge benefit spiritually by suffering this exact ailment? Does this Personality need to get out of a noxious work situation, so falling and hurting herself in the company's parking lot will get her out of there for good? Each Essence is in charge of only one body and can cause the immune system to fail to combat the cause of the ailment. It may want its Charge to meet someone in a certain doctor's office. One man I saw because of his suicide attempt after he broke his back in a fall from a telephone pole eventually married his orthopedist's nurse. How else could he have met his proper future mate if he had not broken some bone? 4. The CIE of the humans can orchestrate epidemics by agreeing with the CIE of the viruses or the CIE of bacteria to infect certain people with a certain strain of these organisms. After enough of the right people have become infected, the CIE pull back the infective agent and the epidemic stops without human intervention. The CIE monitor the reincarnation process. Sometimes they orchestrate many deaths in mass disasters. This allows enough Essences and Personalities to be available for planned reincarnations. The Creator's plans must be fulfilled. On a personal level, I attended four years of college as a pre-med student, then four years of medical school. There it was drilled into me to first make a correct diagnosis and then I should apply the appropriate treatment, as long as it was approved by the FDA and/or my professional organization. I was not taught that every patient was different, but that became apparent during my 30 years of practice. I was not taught that some patients needed their illness for karmic reasons, but that is true. I was not taught that some patients believed God was punishing them for their sins by giving them their illness. The Creator does not operate that way, I learned from the CIE. But that belief system had been taught them by other humans. I was taught that anyone could apply any treatment if taught how to do it, and his patients should get well. I was not taught that any physical means of treatment, such as pills, must be administered by other human being. I was not taught that an unpleasant treater can void the effectiveness of the treatment. Psychotherapy cannot be taught as a standardized treatment procedure, as what a therapist says and does his Personality decides at the moment. I wasn't taught to listen to my own Essence tell me what to say to patients. One of my MPD patients told me she could see my Essence talking into my left ear, telling me what to say to her in therapy sessions. Her complaint was that usually I didn't listen to him and follow his directions. In addition there have been other spiritual sources of advice I ignored. Here is the text of a letter left at my office in Santa Cruz, allegedly composed by the spirit of a patient of mine who had died by a gunshot wound to her head four months before. "Dr. Allison, "I have been asked to communicate with you. But my dear friend, I have many times. I've spoken with you. You need to listen for me. I have been in your office 14 times since I passed on. I'm deeply sorry for the grief I caused you. (For the record, I did not take my own life, and I was not murdered!) . . . I have tried to help you with many different patients. I've been in your office for as long as 4 hours at a time. I've put words in your mind to speak and write. I've read minds and tried to feed information to you. Please listen! I sit by the door on the carpet. If you do not care for my assistance, simply tell me. "I feel you do not have the knowledge to visualize me yet. But you can hear me, and if you desire to do so, you can feel my presence." In medical school, they teach students that doctors are supposed to cure all patients or we should feel like failures. In nursing school, they teach that nurses are to care for patients, but they are not expected to cure them. The reality is that curing is the province of the Essences of the patients, not of the healer. If a cure is required to fulfill and complete the patient's Life Plan, then the patient will recover. In my Life Plan, I was directed by my Essence and CIE to become a doctor and then a psychiatrist. I have learned much from my patients. To cure them was the primary goal of my Personality but not of my Essence. Knowledge about these patients and of myself was the goal of my Essence, and cure was an occasional side benefit. Knowledge about those humans I treated cannot be taken away from me and is why I was led to treat them in the first place. The Essence of the patient is in constant thought communication with the Essence of the treater. We who are usually treaters must allow those messages to get into the consciousness of our Personalities so we can decide how to behave best with that patient. Sometimes the message will be to do something we have never done before. Sometimes it will be to do something we saw work in a previous patient. Sometimes it will be to do nothing to cure, but to be there while that patient experiences whatever her Essence wants her to experience. While any specific method of treatment is important in its own right, all of these other factors involved in the relationship between the two parties involved are of even more importance.