Kate.

Sometimes she pisses me off so much.

I do realize that a lot of this has to do with me pissing myself off. I didn't do an undergraduate in psychology for nothing. I realize that one of the reasons I want to help Kate so much is because I want to believe that when I become like that in a year or so I can be helped. But that's not all of it. There's my natural tendency to want to help everyone and of course my white knight syndrome. But its also that she tries so hard to help everyone else, and it's just unfair and stupid that she should take all the burden on herself and not share it at all. I just want to take some of that burden off of her. Remind her that she is a real live woman who can have a life outside of Orpheus and who shouldn't have to carry the weight of the entire company's emotionally well-being on her shoulders. I want to help! Even if it's just by letting her talk about it to someone else. But she wont let me.

Sometimes I think she does it on purpose. I think she has a martyr syndrome. She only feels worthwhile if she is miserable for the sake of others.

And on top of that she keeps Foreboding. When she knows I can do it, and often do it without meaning to.

I just wish she would share the burden.

Is that totally unreasonable?

On Death.

Today I stood by as members of my office destroyed a soul. It made me wonder about the nature of the soul and death.

Kabbalistically speaking there are four layers to the soul: The Chiah or the Divine Spark, the Neshama or the Higher Self, the Ruach or the Intellect and the Nephesh or the Animal Soul. According to Kabbalistic thought, when we die, the Chiah is automatically reunited with the Divine, whereas the Neshama may also reunite or be reincarnated. Sometimes the Ruach and the Nephesh get left behind, and this is what Kabbalists refer to as ghosts or "shells."

So, if this is true, and it certainly make sense with my experience at Orpheus, then the ghosts we work with may have the intellectual personalities (in some of the higher functioning classes) and the basic desires of the people they were once part of, but they are not the person in whole.

What happens when we send on a ghost or destroy it? Is there really a difference? Do the ghosts we send on reunite with their higher aspects or just get absorbed into the life-force energy of the divine like the Chiah does? If we destroy it, does that destroy some of that divine energy or just disperse it to become another type of energy? How does this affect reincarnation if such a thing exists?

And more importantly: is destroying a ghost the same as destroying a life?

Was I just an accessory to murder, however well deserved it might have been? Do we at Orpheus have the right to make the decisions as to whose souls are to be sent on and whose are to be destroyed?

And if we don't, then who does?