Essence

What is the essence of an object? Of an animal/plant/person(though arguably people fall under "animal" too)? What is it that is essential in these things?

Take a look at say...essence of Vanilla, and in this case i am refering to the synthetic vanilla essence, not vanilla extract. Because Vanilla is becoming rarer (due to various reasons i wont go into here) the price of real Vanilla pods is increasing and too high to be very economical for personal use, say in baking (and most industries would not cut thier profits by using real Vanila, unless of course thier product was extremely expensive making it less accessible to consumers) but before i get carried away into economics lets get back to the fact that essence of vanilla, really isnt anywhere near a match for the real thing. How then can we say it is the essence of Vanilla if it is not as rich as the natural vanilla?

Lets look at, essence of chicken. (Maybe i was hungry when i wrote this or something) Its that funny liquid in bottle, which is supposed to be the essence of what the chicken is. Alright perhaps to say that is hoping too much, it is supposed to be all the good nutrients we would normally get from chicken, only it is in that liquid form. However, it can not be any substitute for an actualy meal of chicken. If we were to eat only essence of chicken we would probably starve, if we ate actual chicken, the worst you can go is malnutrition due to an unbalanced diet.

I suppose what i find is that, when you strip away the 'access' of something, and try to find and then separate the 'essence' from everything else, we lose much of its value in the process. In other words, in attempting to find the essence of something, we are, in fact losing the very thing we search for.

Picture your most identifying feature, then take it out from your image of yourself, and place it alone in your thoughts. It is simply a characteristic. without the rest of your experience, how you look, what you think, what you feel, without the rest of 'you', it becomes something which could apply to anyone. Definitely not your essence, not something solely associated with 'you', that someone would look at and immediately say "Ah yes, that's totally 'so-and-so'!".

There is no part that is not essential to something or someone being who or what they are. To take away a part from the whole is to make something else.