I hadn't read this post until earlier today, when I was checking through the "Heaven and Hell" thread and felt to post an excerpt from the book I'm writing, in response to one of your posts on that thread. Then, I read this, and it immediately clicked: makes absolute and total sense to me. It's similar to what I'm trying to explore in my book, in a "fictional" or "fantastical" adventure/horror/comedy/sci-fi/mythical kind of way. "The Essence" is the term used in my book too. Well I may regret this cos I have some typing ahead, but I'm tryina increase my words per minute anyway. So here goes with another excerpt from "Soul Shakedown" copyright 2006 by Kwame Reuben. (PS: the excerpt in the other thread was written in April or May 2002 and the one that follows was written at the same time and revised in mid-2005.)
Rastafarispeaks.com/Africaspeaks.com/Trinicenter will definitely get an acknowledgement in the "Acknowledgements", should de Most I and de ancestors dem allow "Soul Shakedown" to get published.
EXCERPT:

Since I already done take enough risks of getting me a$$ kicked again, I decide fuh hide meself behind a stall til the cops herd the souls out of Big Market. Once they gone I start walking up and down just trying fuh figure out me next move. As I passin the different stalls I notice something funny; they all got a skinny lil book for sale. Not only in the booksellers' stall, I seein the same book hanging out amongst the vegetables, sittin on top of the clothes, even nesting inside the gutted fish. Wah de rass... I pick up a copy from a fruit stand and as soon as I see the title me heart skip a beat, cos I realizing Jackie and Patricia mussee figure out how to get a message through to me. Alright! I feelin lil hopeful again now. I siddung.................... and start reading.
SOUL REVOLUTION by Jackie Cambridge and Patricia Ramsaroop.

PROLOGUE: The Golden Age

Until recently, souls lived together in perfect balance, treading lightly on the soul-land. It was not a world without suffering; souls partook of the anguish as well as the pleasures of the flesh, and ate pieces of one another in the soul-land between incarnations. But pain and sorrow existed to sweeten pleasure and joy, not to eclipse them, and the life of a typical soul was a long and wondrous journey between the soul-land and the flesh-land and back again, with its ultimate destination being the all-welcoming, all-generating, all-mighty bosom of the great cosmic Essence. In a few broad brush-strokes, I will attempt to give the reader a basic grasp of the ecology and sociology of souls as it applied in this "Golden Age" of balance; an order that is still with us, but which is now threatened by forces as powerful as they are malevolent...

Whether in the soul-land or in the flesh-land, souls are nourished by the infinite energy of the Essence (which they absorb by a process analogous to photosynthesis in plants, and which is equivalent to water for a flesh-form; just as our physical bodies are mostly made up of water and we need constant supplies of water to stay alive, so souls are mostly made up of the energy of the Essence and they need to constantly replenish their supply). When in the flesh-land, souls must also have what we would call "food" as well as the "water" of the Essence. This "food" consists of the experiences and emotions generated by the interaction of the incarnated soul with its physical environment, as processed through the physical brain. As pioneering soul-researcher Compton Sharpe discovered recently, the soul's "digestive process" leaves behind a diluted residue of "food" and "water", which accumulates in the phsyical brain of the soul's incarnated flesh-form and becomes what we incarnated souls call our "personality"- essentially the waste material left over from the process of soul-nutrition and hence analagous to "soul feces", although as an incarnated personality myself I prefer to refer to what makes up "me" by the term "fertilizer", which sounds a bit nicer than "feces".
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And it go on so. I know is Jackie writing it even if is Patricia providing the information- that is just he style to blabber on and on and try make some literary masterwork out of this when we deh pon a mission and time is of the essence. Or else is me mind translating the information into this book-form and imitating books I've read, cos I ain' seein how Jackie coulda write all that in the lil time he been in the lab. He mussee just downloaded this information into the soul-enclosure as a "cookie" or whatever dem computer-tings name, and that is how it manifesting here.............