Hello Dave:

This is from P.M.H. Atwater's book "Beyond the light." Have you experienced something similar? Reminds me of higher self in a disk/oversoul sense.

Starting on page 109:

"Regression sessions serve only one purpose, I came to realize, and that is to assist the client in gaining detachment and perspective.

Then I happened upon the human soul. It was most unusual how that occurred. The soul just  "popped in" and took over a session one day, surprising me, and changing the "rules" I thought applicable to hypnosis.

After this first encounter, I discovered that the soul, anyone's soul, is unlike any individual or personality type or supposed incarnation. It is unique unto itself. I came to recognize the soul as an objective and loving source of limitless knowledge. The room temperature would feel warmer when it emerged during a session, and the client would seem to glow. Advice would be given either for the prostrate client, for me, or for another not present. The soul never limited itself or played favorites. Sometimes discourses would issue forth on life and its purpose--gentle, effective discourses that seemed somehow awesome and sacred. The soul's voice, no matter from what client, nearly always sounded the same or similar. It is without identity, eternal, yet personal enough to offer valuable insight about what seems mundane.

Soon after this discovery I closed my practice. Prospective clients preferred finding something to blame their problems on, rather than opening up to the voice of their own soul. ...

Years later, I was reading a professional journal when I saw mention of Inner Self Helper, or ISH, that was identified in the treatment of multiple personality disorders. Using hypnosis, therapists had at times been able to isolate a peculiar "voice" that was unlike any of the patient's varied personalities. Stating that it was eternal, the voice had no identity, was compassionate and loving, gave objective advice for the patient's best interests, and would guide and instruct the therapist--rather than the other way around. The ISH seemed to be the central organizing "core" of the individual's essence. I smiled when I read that, thinking counselors had at last encountered what had once surprised me so long ago--the very real power of the human soul (or, as they termed it, the ISH).""

Albert

Boris:

You're welcome. An interesting thing about Atwater's book is that she interviewed about 3,000 near death experiencers. Unlike other studies, she found that one out of seven people had a negative experience (which sometimes evolved into a positive experience). She found that people who had negative experiences always had an issue with either anger, fear or guilt (sometimes a combination).  She also found that people had negative experiences, because this is what they needed.

My feeling is that near death experiences aren't influenced by our psychological limitations alone, but also by what we need to experience and what we need to share with others. Regarding sharing with others, just as people need to have different types of NDEs, different people need to read about different types of NDEs.

Boris wrote on Sep 25^th, 2007 at 1:46pm:

Just wondering,

Does anyone know if ATwater is related to the Atwater who's a director of something at TMI?  If so, maybe he, the TMI Atwater, would know how she interpreted it.

Bets

Here are some more thoughts.

When I read parts of the story of Sybil, it occurred to me that perhaps multiple personalities are sometimes created by a higher self so a person can deal with a very difficult lifetime. Attached is an article by a person who has visited Bruce's site, and he expresses the same possibility at the end of his article. Neither of us state we know for certain.

http://www.qnet.com/~bklug/test/peamg1.htm

I looked up inner self help and found the below article.

http://www.dissociation.com/index/Definition/

Below is a key part of the article.

Characteristics of the Inner Self Helper (ISH)

A. Prime Directive of the ISH is to keep patient alive until her Life Plan is completed and fulfilled. The ISH will prevent suicide in any way possible.

B. Has no date of origin; has always been present.

C. Can only agape love; is incapable of hatred.

D. Has awareness of and belief in "The Creator."

E. Is aware that the Celestial Intelligent Energy (CIE) put her in charge of teaching this person how to live and move forward properly.

F. Is able to work on the inside of the patient's mind, as co-therapist, while the human therapist works on the outside.

G. Knows all about history of patient and can predict short term future.

H. Possesses no personal sense of gender identity, but will assume either gender the therapist is comfortable with.

I. Talks intellectually instead of emotionally, carefully chooses precise words, speaks in short concise sentences; prefers to answer questions; gives enigmatic instructions. ("Teach her humility today.")

J. Avoids using slang; does not have the capacity for put-downs or guilt-trips.

K. Is aware of patient's past lifetimes.

Thank you for the answer Dave. My guess is that whatever it is that answers, is flexible about how it is referred to. The important thing is that answers are received.  That which answers cares very much about the one being helped.

When it comes to multiple personalities, I figure none of the personalities represent the original personality. Perhaps when it comes to schizophrenics, the original personality becomes confused. Must be hard to work with a self that is confused.

Yes Dave, I am not in your field, but it is interesting to hear you, a professional, cofirm some conclusions I reached from my contact with schizophrenics.
Various parts of the mind become disconnected from each other and the whole, and thoughts do not go through the process of being modified in the appropriate part of the mind/soul. Like an impulse will not be orperly tempered by further checking. Some normal facilities seem to be missing.

They also seem as if they are dreaming while awake, and cant tell the dream from reality.

Improvement comes from some reintegration.

Interesting stuff. I've no proper knowledge of the topic but the reality is presumably that most of us are to some degree schizophrenic. My own experience (described elsewhere) of getting sucked into a persona that sought conventional business and career success above all as a result of my buying into conditioning was surely headed in this direction.

I was lucky enough that I probably never quite got deeply enough into the dream to loose total touch with myself, but it's presumably the case that that's what happens to many - they get lost in separate dreams, and toggle between them depending on circumstances. It presumably explains the apparent inhumanity of many too.

Society seems to often define maturity as immersion in a persona of this sort to the point where often awareness of true self is lost - it then goes on to build up all sorts of convoluted rationales to justify the resulting behaviour. (like making hereos of people acting against their normal compassionate instincts)

Another example is possibly the way we unconsciously toggle between personae or whole suites of behaviour patterns depending on circumstances. Dominant in one situation, manipulative in another, subservient in another and so on.

Buddhist teaching argues that loving treatment and meditation are the way out of this situation. That meditation and the absence of external triggers creates the space and insight in the mind that's needed to get below the critical stress levels and see through the circumstances that trigger the sub personae. Which if not activated and fed energy will then die off over time.

Not sure how workable this might be for a seriously ill person though, especially since it requires a fair degree of motivation and persistence. Not to mention an incredibly caring and giving support structure.....

I'm in agreement with Vajra and R, but it seems useful to point out that the kind of logic used in everyday reality is "secondary process".  This is rational in nature and allows us to form abstractions, intermediate levels of truth or partial applicability of ideas. We learn to act in this way somewhere in the first year or so.

Those whose chemistry and internal wiring prevents secondary process from developing fully have to make do with "primary process", which is emotional logic. This is nominal in nature, and has no ability to abstract except to view other nominals as equivalent. Those who think in this manner have poor discriminatory apparatus because one nominal instance of eg. a typewriter is identical to all other instances of the same nominal, hence all typewriters are the same typewriter.

Secondary process leads to a state of hysteria if we allow ourselves to brood and fret about things, and can lead to the famous "nervous breakdown" when all our imaginary ego-supportive world collapses and we're left with reality.  The primary process equivaent is that the entire world becomes dangerous, and it is not possible to isolate the dangers.

The core "self" is thus very much evident in hysterical type function, which is how we all get along normally in problem solving. We fuss a bit, then we make changes, then we feel good (or fuss some more) and that's it. The core of personality is available, and if properly directed can regress into meditation where it resolves into a primary level as we enter samadhi.

For the schiz actor the core personality is only visible through gaps in the collage of rules, fears, habits, feelings and poorly integrated data - thus the same event may or may not be viewed as similar to its predecessor. Connections obvious to us may not be visible in schiz, because we can abstract details, some good, some middling, some unpleasant, while the schiz is forced to deal with the entire nominal chunk as a single indivisible fact with nothing but a global feeling attached to it. In a sense, the schiz state brings the entire afterlife state into the everyday world, and deals with it much as we deal wth stuff in dreams - not very well.

Hysterics are great - we normally operate in this general realm, and are more or less inclined to emotional  reactions. Therapy is essentially a matter of relaxing away interference so we can go on with life. Very simple.

Schiz is generally untreatable except with drugs. Shakuntala Modi (Remarkable Healings) claims to have developed a method of hypnotherapy for schiz, but I'm unable to replicate her findings, and therefor I wonder at their validity. Modi's approach is to view the hostile fragments or subpersonalities as demonic beings that use tools like psychic hammers, screws and nails to attack the person.  All I've been able to discover is that these are hostile essences of some sort, but they seem to me to be part of the actor's own repertoire.

Oh well - we do what we can. Fortunately, for cases with abrupt and severe onset, there is a very high probablity of equally abrupt and spontaneous remission.

d