Wisdom Notes on Spirituality

Higher Self and Ego

or Soul and Ego

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

In my view, spirituality is changing. In past times, life was hard and often bleak, so ideas about spirituality reflected this. Religion, as the most visible arena of spiritual consciousness, was also hard and often bleak, with emphasis on unyielding moralities. Nowadays, as many people find life easier, so spirituality becomes reflected in more diverse ideas about it. In hard times, ideas about spirituality are narrow, whereas in more affluent times, spirituality expands and becomes adaptable, and spreads out into countless new channels.

There is an issue here that has been overlooked in traditional teachings. For example, consider the issue of the mind and the obstacles that it can produce for the spiritual seeker. Why did Sigmund Freud have the impact on Western thought that he had?  Because he and his followers created a technical vocabulary for charting some forms of consciousness. Using terms like projection, sublimation, displacement, transference, Oedipus complex, a person can begin to understand how his/her mind works. More especially, he/she can begin to discover how the mind both helps and hinders spiritual beliefs. A technical vocabulary acts like a series of signposts in the darkness of the mind. Before this vocabulary existed, people floundered in confusion and speculation over their psychological issues.

By analogy, if we tap into the higher self  but lack an adequate spiritual and technical vocabulary, we won’t really understand any insights that we may get. Hence we will be sure to mis-interpret them and end up chasing spiritual will-of-the-wisps. Now an adequate technical vocabulary exists for the practice of Eastern meditation, so the advantages and disadvantages of meditation are adequately understood. Whereas, for someone with abilities in psychic healing (also called spiritual healing), the technical vocabulary is inadequate: and so healing is poorly understood.

What we come up against in theories, old and new, are the shackles of using terminology which is vague, undefined, and which changes with age. One reason for this vagueness is that it can be hard to separate conscious desires and needs from subconscious ones. There is always dynamic interaction between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. For example, consider the traditional phrase body, soul, and spirit. The way that soul was used 2000 years ago is different from the way it is often used today. The concept of ego was not used then; I consider that what today would be considered to belong to a good ego (its conscious good ideals) would have been allocated to soul 2000 years ago. And what today is considered to be a bad ego (its subconscious bad influences) was 2000 years ago allocated to body. This was useful at the time, since by blaming the body for emotions like guilt and hatred, the person could avoid blaming himself for them.

Hence, in my view, 2000 years ago, soul equalled good ego, whilst body equalled bad ego.
So nowadays soul should be used as the source of spiritual ideals and visions, separate from the ego but linked to it. To avoid confusion, I usually use the term higher self as a replacement for soul.

At the beginning of our modern era, the French philosopher Rene Descartes brought the “I ” or ego (which is more or less the personality) into contemporary thinking, and this change was made permanent with the works of Freud, and I follow this usage.

If we don’t understand our spiritual abilities, we can still be effective in intuitive ways, but we won’t be able to explain clearly to others how we achieve the successes that we do achieve (and we won’t be able to explain why we sometimes fail ). To achieve understanding always requires that we study whatever issues really absorb us, together with the empirical exploration of those issues. We only understand what we study, and this applies to spiritual topics as much as it does to ordinary academic and career topics.

The Scheme of Things

In the dualistic conception of reality, there is matter and there is consciousness. The monist view is that matter and consciousness both arise from an original unitary reality. One traditional view is that God puts a spark of itself in every unit of matter and also puts a spark of itself in every unit of consciousness. Each human has a higher self which is its spark of divine consciousness, and each cell of the physical body has a spark of divinity (which is the basis of the unconscious mind) [¹]. The spark of divinity within each cell is also the basis of spiritual healing.

The higher self, as the spark of divine consciousness, is separate from the ego. Other names for the higher self are the silent watcher [²] and the witness. One view is that each higher self controls one or more egos. For beings such as plants and insects, which have no individual egos, there is the idea of a group mind: for example, one higher self may act as the group mind for a colony of ants. Overall, there are several ways that the idea of the spark of consciousness can be described.

For a human, the immature ego uses the body as a vehicle for the expression of emotion, desire and intellect within the physical world. This enables it to learn through experience. As the ego slowly and gradually learns about cause and effect from the way it expresses its desires and needs, it begins to mature. The higher self exerts a subtle influence on the immature ego, and this influence gets stronger as the ego matures and becomes more sensitive. Eventually the ego will become interested in spiritual ideals. Then the higher self can use the ego as a vehicle for the pursuit of suitable spiritual idealisms.

The ego (or personality) is on a long journey through life, a journey that will take a multitude of lifetimes. So the drama of life as played out by each ego takes place within the context of reincarnation. As part of this journey, the ego experiences both pleasure and pain, both happiness and sorrow. These ups and downs of life occur because the ego has a subconscious mind. The higher self cannot suffer, since the basis of its emotional state is equanimity; it does not have a subconscious mind and neither does it reincarnate.

It is a question of personal choice whether a person believes that he lives only one life or whether he accepts the theory of reincarnation. If reincarnation is not accepted then we cannot understand the role of sorrow in our life, and so it becomes difficult to accept that any higher reality can be a benevolent one.

Agency

The reason that I use the idea of the higher self in my writings is because I focus on the idea of agency. For something to change, then an agent has to be the cause of the change. If someone does something unpleasant to me and I desire to seek revenge, then I am the agent that wants revenge and so will do something unpleasant to that other person. Similarly, if something good happens to me and I feel psychologically uplifted, then an agent has acted on me and caused this good feeling to arise. The sources of agency acting on me are:

c). My conscious self (my ideals).
d). My subconscious self.
e). My higher self.
f ). Astrological and psychic influences. (The sources of such influences are highly evolved spiritual beings).
g). Other people.

My view is that the ego or personality is the doer in the body. The higher self is usually a watcher and observer, and only interacts with the ego by sometimes indicating within the ego’s consciousness that the ego is doing something that the higher self dislikes. In my case, my higher self usually generates the emotion of guilt within me when I do something that the higher self does not like. This chastisement is one of the roots of the voice of conscience (though for most people, my view is that their conscience is mainly constructed from social conditioning, since they are not usually sensitive enough to detect influences from their own higher self ).

Now all people, from primitives to advanced spiritual aspirants, go through trials and sorrow. The most common mind-set amongst spiritual aspirants and teachers is that whatever is bad is due to the ego, and whatever is good is due to the higher self. This mind-set makes it almost impossible to actually identify how spirituality really works. For example, if the higher self decides to chastise the ego, that ego will view the “punishment” as coming from within the bad part of itself, leaving intact the belief that the higher self never punishes the ego.

Crises

Normally we go through life trying to keep within the psychological boundaries that we are comfortable with. Even when we know we have limitations, we usually feel that the limitations we know are better than the possibilities of wholeness that we don’t know. We instinctively feel that to try and ascend beyond our present limitations will be difficult and sorrowful (since in order to rise above our limitations, we have first to become fully aware of these limitations and to be fully conscious of all the sorrow that they cause us).

Therefore, in order for us to develop our inner potentials, the higher self creates crises that the person cannot avoid and will have to deal with. These crises are usually out of the ordinary, as far as the person is concerned, and are not always the same as any crisis that the person may regularly bring on himself through his behaviour or the work he does. 

For example, someone who is a thief can expect to face crises when he is found out. These crises are brought on himself by himself, and so are to be expected. However, if the thief and his partner find themselves in a road accident and the partner is crippled, then the thief may now find that he is forced into a caring role in order to look after his partner. This crisis may radically change his character for the better. In this scenario, I would assume that the higher self of the thief helped to cause the accident.

What I find from personal experience is that in order for me to evolve both psychologically and spiritually, my higher self puts me through a lot of bad experiences and crises. One easy way to generate a crisis is to induce guilt in the ego. This unpleasant process is a common theme in religious literature, and is often called the via dolorosa.

Why does this happen?  The “bad” experiences that we go through can be used as material for developing skills in personal and/or spiritual evolution. We become aware of how we failed to understand the problems we experienced and how this lack of understanding helped to create unskilful ways of response. Hence we become driven to find better ways of dealing with such problems. As we try to overcome our failures, so we evolve. We do not evolve by being content to bask in our successes.

In my case, I have always been rebellious to most forms of authority in this lifetime. And so I have always been prepared to question spiritual teachings. I always put my own experience before any theoretical teachings, so I lable myself as an existentialist. If I discover that there is a conflict between my personal experience and any theory, I always choose to rely on personal experience. However, I am always prepared to re-interpret past personal experience in the light of newer personal experience.

We can never truly understand an issue if we only look at it through rose-coloured spectacles. But when we become very critical of an issue, then we tend to be more realistic in our assessment and understanding of it. When things go right, then we can construct reasons for this success in any number of ways that bolster our ego. But when things go wrong, we tend to pick over everything in minute detail to discover why it went wrong. So our analysis of our failures is likely to be much more accurate than our analysis of our successes.

Me and my Higher Self

My father was a career army NCO (non-commissioned officer, that is, a senior sergeant or a sergeant major). When I was 18, I applied to go to a prestigious army training college (equivalent to doing a degree). Eventually I had to go for an interview. I started it well, but it didn’t last. When the most important question was asked – what were the qualities of leadership – my higher self made my mind go blank. My thinking processes stopped, so that I could not produce an answer. Inevitably I failed the interview. I was aware that it was my higher self who made me fail, not just nervousness on my part. Destiny had something else planned for me.

From my 30s onwards I have had a deep love-hate relationship to my higher self. I wanted to do things my way, but quite often the higher self shut doors to paths it didn’t want me to go down. I wanted to pursue the path of classical yoga and meditation, but a dream told me I wouldn’t get any results that way: my path was to be something new, not something traditional. Some years later I realised that this meant my path was to be the practice of psycho-analysis.

The main problem that I faced is that though my greatest need is to follow a path of goodness and nobility, all of my expertise deals with the non-good, the non-noble side of the mind. I always go deep into anything that preoccupies me; I nearly always “jump in at the deep end” of new experiences. So once I realised that I could not escape the analysis of the dark side of the mind, I decided to explore all my hidden “depravities and perversions”. Being British, I used the traditional means of keeping distress under control – the stiff upper lip – and so I kept everything limited to phantasy. At least it’s more interesting than watching television. However, this conflict between my noble aspirations and my dark inclinations seriously distressed me for around 30 years. The core problem is one of sensitivity: as a person evolves, he becomes more sensitive. This is necessary since he has to learn to attune to the higher aspects of mind. He becomes more sensitive to the good side of the mind, but unfortunately he also becomes more sensitive to the dark side of the mind.

The driving idea behind my attempts to understand my woes is the idea that any standard of morality eventually becomes out-of-date. For example, within a scenario of reincarnation, suppose that a thousand years ago my standard of morality was adequate for conventional needs. Then over the next few lifetimes I cloistered myself in monasteries. When a person shuts himself away from society for a long time, his social skills will deteriorate through lack of use. Eventually the standards of morality of society would evolve beyond my own standards. So if I ever came back into society I would make serious mistakes: I would lack the social skills that are necessary to produce harmonious relationships. This theme is my basic explanation of why in this lifetime if anything could go wrong for me, then it did go wrong. I have decided to make all my mistakes in this lifetime, so there will be no more left for me to trip over in the next lifetime!

My higher self put me through long years of dreadful experiences in order that I could accumulate the necessary facts for developing a new way of understanding the mind. Realistic theories cannot be created unless the thinker has sufficient facts. I have no problems with that part of my fate. However, from 1993 onwards my relationship to my higher self nose-dived into the most utter negativity that was possible. My higher self is a martinet. A martinet only blames and never praises. The mind-set of a martinet is that when I do a job, then I don’t need praise when I do it well (because that is what is expected of me), but if I make a mess of it then I get blamed and punished. My relationship was a standard one of reward and punishment, except that the only reward was the development of intellectual understanding. There was no emotional joy in contact with my higher self. I just felt that my higher self was very bad at managing me whilst I was trying to do a very difficult and unpleasant task of exploring the dark side of the mind. I have learned the hard way that doing the right thing from the wrong motives does not carry any spiritual merit.

My higher self gave me several positive experiences in the years before my psycho-analysis began.  Since I did  the psycho-analysis on my own, without the help of any therapist, I call it my self-analysis. I recorded the positive experiences in my notebooks. Spirituality felt very stimulating, even enchanting sometimes. Leading up to the start of my self-analysis I had several lovely dreams and inspirational moments; during those times I had the feeling, on three separate occasions, that I was asked by my higher self whether I wanted to explore myself more deeply. Each time I said yes. Once the analysis began, the honeymoon ceased, the inspiring moments disappeared and it was very hard work most of the way for around 30 years. 

Around 1994, during a very difficult time for me, my higher self generated the feeling of rejection in me, that is, I felt to the core of my being that I had been rejected by my higher self. No doubt the reasons for it were that I needed to understand the impact that rejection has on a sensitive ego. This rejection was the worst trauma that I have ever experienced. In retaliation I rejected the influences of my higher self, and God too. For the next 15 years or more, I was very hostile to all forms of traditional spirituality. I was so confused that I tried to find a way of living a spiritual life that did not depend on higher self, God, or guardian spirits; I never succeeded. I was adamant that although the higher self could control my life, I was not going to let it control my thinking; thinking was the only sphere where I had freedom. So during these difficult years the only ideal I followed was the pursuit of truth and wisdom, unshackled from any tradition.

This deep conflict between me and my higher self enabled me to understand more clearly how spirituality actually works. I know who does what in the complex of higher self, ego, and body. The whole tragic drama forced me to base my intellectual explorations only on my own desires for truth and justice, and made me independent of any traditional sources of spiritual authority. I was a rebel from the corns on my feet to the pimples on my head, and all spaces in-between!

Much of conventional spiritual wisdom insists that the intellect is a barrier to spiritual progress: the idea here is that the intellect fosters doubt, and also because spiritual contact with higher states of mind occurs intuitively and not by rational thought. Intuition, rather than rationality, is the basis of most spiritual thinking. However, it is only rationality that can identify delusion and self-deception in a person’s understanding of spirituality. I have used my rationality (as well as my intuition) to construct a new view of some aspects of spirituality that will be needed as New Age ideas gradually become accepted into mainstream Western thought.

From my negative relationship to my higher self, I derived a reasonably-accurate assessment of how much of my successes – in life and in intellectual work – are due to me (the ego) and how much those successes are due to higher self influences. In fact, my successes are largely due to my higher self. If I try and do something important without the higher self helping me, then my success is meagre. The result of all this is that my view on spirituality differs in many ways from much of New Age thinking. A person is only successful in life – creating his own reality – if his goals are supported by his higher self. If the higher self remains neutral, then the person will find that his successes are erratic and unpredictable, no matter how much “positive thinking” he applies.

Direction by the Higher Self

Every one who is trying to evolve, who dreams of living in a better world, has experienced failure many times. My view on the major crises and experiences ( both good and bad) that happen to a person is that they are due to the influence of the person’s higher self. It seems to me that when a person is born on Earth, there is a pre-set plan for the important phases of his life – what he is to attain, what he will fail at, the significant people he will meet, marry, work with, etc. This blueprint is not predestination, not a plan that is cast in stone, but one that is changeable. The person’s higher self uses its influence in such ways that the person’s life follows the pattern that the higher self desires him to follow.

There is some leeway for personal choice, but this is variable. If a person is leading a low-key and uneventful life, then it does not matter very much what he does or attains. Hence he may have a lot of choice about who he will marry, work with, etc, because, for example, whoever he marries will not radically change his pattern of life. However, if a person’s life is going to be high-key (he is to become an important business man, politician, army general, etc) then his range of choice is much less – now it does matter who he marries, what school he goes to, etc.

To ensure that a person in a high-key life follows the required spiritual blueprint for his life, his higher self manipulates his relationships and professional life. This means that doors open when he wants to do something that his higher self wants him to do, and doors shut when he wants to do something that his higher self does not want him to do. For example: if he is changing jobs and applies for a job that is not in the required spiritual pattern, his higher self will ensure that he fails the job interview. Things can change once he has attained the major goal of his life; he is likely to have more personal choice in his life, since now he has to learn to live with the consequences of what he has attained.

I entered on a deep psycho-analysis due to my higher self manipulating my life in such a way that the conditions became ripe for such an analysis. The method employed by my higher self to get me to accept something was nearly always to induce some good feelings in me. Under the influence of good feelings I always agreed on what the higher self wanted. Once I agreed, the good feelings disappeared. Sometimes this manipulation amused me, and sometimes I felt bitterness and resentment over it. Nowadays I am no longer bothered by it. I accept that the knowledge that I have gained could not have been gained in any other way. There is the traditional idea that the sorrows and difficulties that we meet in life are actually good for us; I have finally been able to accept and embrace this view – I could not accept it during the times of my trials.

• Inspiration

A lot of confusion in religious and spiritual circles revolves around the question of what or who sends us inspiration, guidance, love, faith, etc. There are many contenders: obviously God is what most people like to think is their guiding light. But other ones are the person’s higher self; friends, teachers and guides who are at the moment in heaven and acting as astral guides; a religious teacher (a saint or the founder of his religion – again, these will be in heaven); psychic contact from teachers living on Earth; the person’s own subconscious mind.

The major source of inspiration on me has been my own higher self, aided occasionally by astral guides and “deceased” family members who are in heaven. I had psychic contact (via a dream) with my English yoga teacher, Jack Bolton, when he passed away in the early 1990s; he came in spirit to say goodbye to me since our paths will never again cross in the future – I am going in a different direction than the way he wants to go. He wants to sit at the feet of the masters; I prefer to travel my own path.

I think that my experience can be generalised to most of humanity, that is, God does not make contact with a person except in exceptional circumstances (perhaps what we might call enlightenment experiences). God can be thought of as a chief executive officer who delegates responsibilities down a hierarchy. The religious person ascribes to God what really is the work of his own higher self or his astral guides. It does not matter what the person believes his source of inspiration to be, so long as his beliefs lead him to adopt better ethical and social standards. Then when the person has evolved enough, his higher self will take over the role of guide, aided by whatever teacher the person has faith in.

Our intuitive connection to our higher self has to use our prevailing interests. Or, to put this idea another way, the higher self finds it easiest to influence us by using our prevailing interests. For example: I am orientated mainly to the intellectual aspect of the mind (with emotions and feelings being secondary) and so my higher self mainly influences my mind when I am thinking about any significant issue. Someone else may use the idea of “vibrations”, and so his higher self will use this interest as the means to channel its influence to him. Some people focus on will power and the need to triumph over obstacles, and so their higher selves will use the factors of success and failure in tasks as ways of influencing such people. And so on. Obviously some means of influence are common to all people, no matter what interests them: for example, dreams, “coincidences”, visions.

Soul Searching and Sensitivity

One of the aspects of New Age thinking is that the person increases his level of sensitivity. Sensitivity means that he becomes more influenced by the subtle aspects of the mind; in effect, the subconscious mind becomes more active than it used to be. Sensitivity is necessary in order to learn how to handle the mind. Unfortunately, not only the good aspects of sensitivity are magnified but also the bad aspects. So the person becomes more aware of the limitations to his ability to form harmonious social and sexual relationships. Then this increased awareness leads to increased frustration, which in turn increases our nervousness when trying to make new relationships. Small difficulties may get magnified until they seem to be insuperable. We may get the feeling that the mind is going round in circles, and so we may feel like banging our head on the wall or kicking the furniture.

If there is a lot of frustration in our life and we lack a sense of purpose or any New Age ideals, then our higher self may generate a crisis in us. Because of our increased level of sensitivity, the crisis plunges us into confusion and sorrow. In my case, one occasion this happened was when I was about 30. My higher self generated an intense wave of guilt (in self-hate mode) in me and made me see the low quality of my life [³]. The effect was traumatic and made me question where my life was going – it was going nowhere. So I was propelled onto the traditional “soul search” and began exploring what meaning there was to life. I did the rounds of groups who claimed that they had the answers to the confusion of life. Yoga and Buddhism had the most appeal for me, but eventually I became dissatisfied with all groups. Around my mid-40s, I left all the groups I was in and went on my own individual journey deep within myself, analysing myself and discovering my psychological limitations and strengths, as well as some ways in which the mind works.

How much confusion and sorrow is inflicted on the person by his higher self depends on how much change is required in that person. It’s rather like pushing a cart – the bigger the push, the further the cart can travel. So the bigger the push that our higher self gives us, the further we will travel on our spiritual path. To follow a spiritual path is very difficult, and we usually avoid it if we can (we just prefer to be “normal”). So when the time is ripe for a change, the higher self puts the person through a crisis. If we are already trying to be spiritual, then the crisis is felt to be positive and we can “go with the flow”. If we are going nowhere, then the crisis is a painful one.

Quite simply, the crisis is one of orientation. Your higher self wants you to orientate towards spirituality. Since your ideas on spirituality are probably quite vague and muddled, then your course over the next few years is to engage with the soul-search journey. This is a journey of self-discovery. You need to explore and discover what spirituality means to you. It is a process of trial and error till you find what is right for you.  And it’s all hard work, with plenty of blood, sweat and tears along the way. From this exploration you will emerge a different person.

In the old days, spirituality was nearly always practised in monasteries or hermitages, which gave the person isolation from the “temptations” of the normal world. The result was that the rest of society did not benefit much from the attainments of spiritual devotees. However, I feel that nowadays, as the New Age slowly begins, spirituality has to be practised in the world, so that everyone can share in it. If a devotee had practised spiritual development in isolation in previous incarnations on Earth then he/she may still find value in it today. But for newcomers to spirituality, I believe that development in isolation will not work – it will be just a waste of time. It is the person’s higher self which enables the person to develop spiritual abilities; if the higher self wants the person to develop abilities whilst living a normal social life, then the person will not develop such abilities in isolation no matter how hard he/she tries. In other words, modern spirituality has to fit the needs of modern life.

[¹]. In my use of terminology, the subconscious mind is personal to the person, whilst the unconscious mind is general to all humanity.
For example, emotions come from the unconscious mind, whilst desires come from the subconscious mind. [1]

[²]. My experience of the Silent Watcher is described in the book Landmarks of Spirituality, section Orientations. [2]

[³]. Guilt is an emotion. I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [3]

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