Observations placeholder
Jonah and his four other selves
Identifier
006043
Type of Spiritual Experience
None
Background
One thing of interest that came out of Dr Wilbur's studies was that all Sybil's Personalities shared the same 'ethical' codes. And it is known that other cases of multiple personality also share this same trait, possibly implying that 'conscience' lies with the Higher spirit ………..
But in other studies in which Dr Wilbur participated the separation of memory and personality as a unit was verified.
There was also some evidence that it was the Higher spirit that created the Personalities as a defence mechanism.
A description of the experience
Sybil – Professor Flora Rheta Schreiber
..........Not a great deal is known about this condition. But we do know that the different selves of any one person are likely to share the same ethical code, the same basic moral structure.......... on the other hand..........
The four selves of a twenty four year old, each of whom was independently given a psychological word association test, had totally different responses for individual words and for sets of words.
From self to self there was indeed no leakage, no cross fertilisation of a single word association. Unmistakeably, selves I, II, III and IV were as independent in their responses as if they were four separate individuals.
A battery of psychological and neurological tests was also administered to the four selves of another patient – Jonah – a twenty seven year old. The selves reacted with complete independence of one another. Even their EEGs (electroencephalograms) were unalike…
...........That Dr Wilbur made the diagnosis not only of Jonah but also of 5 other cases in 7 years seems to indicate – just by the law of averages – that this illness occurs more frequently than is recognised by physicians. Not impossibly many persons who suffer from amnesia are in reality multiple personalities..........
..........What is clearly substantiated is that the escape, which is undertaken without the awareness of the waking self, far from being conscious, is a strategy of the unconscious mind. Clear, too is that the selves, who are part of the strategy and who exist outside of the waking self’s awareness, function as autonomous entities.
The autonomy, observed in the case of the selves of Sybil and reaffirmed through the direct observation of these other six cases by Dr Wilbur and her colleagues, also held up under the scrutiny of objective measurements. The startling finding was that the waking self and each of the secondary selves of a given multiple personality react like different people