Your essence is your soul or higher self, the part of you that experiences all your lifetimes on earth. It is spawned by the Tao into the dimensional universe, which consists of seven planes of exis-tence. The core of it is the spark of the Tao that spawned it.

Just as your essence is an expansion of the Tao, your personality is an expansion of your essence. Before your essence begins incarnating, it is, you might say, a seed pod full of potential. It has had no experience, so it seeks all experience. It casts forth one seed, a piece of itself, into its first lifetime, and hence the game begins. Every experience on the physical plane expands your essence. If your essence were already whole and complete in the sense in which you might think of it, if it had nothing to learn, it would not bother to confine itself within human bodies. The very limiting of an aspect of itself in a human body gives rise to more possibilities, more experiences.

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Essence contact is a direct, clear, and powerful connection with the essence. It occurs either internally, between an individual’s essence and personality, or externally, between the essences of two people whose personalities are adequately open. It results primarily from genuine desire. The reason that stress often brings about essence contact is that under stress, there might be the desire if you are about to fall off a cliff with one hand grasping at crumbling rock, you might start praying. Because of the severity of that situation, an opening may occur in you that would not otherwise. But your essence does not require that you be under duress in order to make contact. The best way to develop essence contact is gradually, a little bit at a time. We recommend that you keep opening to your essence on a daily basis. Ask for its input and energy. Gradually, you start to have your essence properly represented in your life, if it is not already, just as the healing of your emotions allows your emotional self to be represented in your life. Every part of you deserves to be integrated into your life.

Your essence decides the big picture, and your personality, the details. Your essence sets the course and your personality carries it out. The essence is more adept than the personality at projecting the probable outcome of certain actions, and will block and reign them in if they are significantly off track. However, the essence is not all-knowing. Fundamentally, it incarnates for the enjoyment of creating and adventuring into the unknown. This really is a game, in a sense the only game there is.

The essence becomes bored when there is little growth occurring. If there is little growth occurring, it is because there is something stuck. Sometimes the essence will generate a traumatic event to jar the personality loose, because that is the only way to get through.

Your essence is neutral about how you grow, but it feels much better to grow through joy than through pain. It is only because people insist on growing through pain that this is the predominant way of growing at this time on earth.

Ultimately, there is no stopping growth. To make an analogy, if a four year-old decides that he no longer wants to grow physically, he can wear very tight clothing and never take it off. After a while, he will start ripping it and bursting buttons, and will find it difficult to move, but he will still grow.