What is Our Higher Self, and How do We Connect with It?

Posted On November 18, 2020 / Written by Dr. Linda Gadbois

The idea of our higher self can be a bit confusing to understand in the practical sense, because different spiritual systems present it differently by using different archetypes and allegories, while the relationship itself that’s being exemplified is basically the same. The most basic principle there is in regards to describing our spiritual nature, is the universal Law of the Triad, or the three-in-one law, also referred to as the Trinity, and the threefold nature of the mind and soul. This is a Universal Principle because it’s fundamental in creating reality and acts as the seed or kernel out of which all other laws have their nativity, and it’s the initiating power that underlies all of reality that’s represented symbolically through cultural symbols and metaphors in every culture on Earth.

This idea is also very paradoxical due to the fact that it’s the primal law that underlies everything else, and operates through the Law of Vibration and Polarity, which is not only the underlying matrix as the substrata of reality, but is also the means through which we move between upper and lower planes. The term upper plane is referring to the level of pure mind as the conscious aspect that constructs the Astral-body as a thought-form (3-D model) which serves as the blueprint for constructing and regenerating our physical body, along with the reality projected through the personality of our body. And likewise, the term lower plane is referring to the unconscious aspect of our self that’s submerged within the material reality through our body as an element of that reality, having it as an experience. This is why our material reality is represented as a shadow, mirror image, or reflection of our higher human soul.

The etheric-double or light-body, which serves as the thematic template and blueprint for structuring the entire lower plane, also serves as the medium or conduit for communication between planes, which is referred to psychologically as the subconscious aspect of the mind. The term planes, as the term is used in this context, can be most accurately thought of as mental states that we move back and forth between as a means of first creating our reality as a projection born out of our mental model, while simultaneously being fully submerged within that reality and having a direct experience of it, usually without realizing that we’re the one actually creating it. The different aspects of the mind and soul, which are synonymous terms, are only distinguishable from each other as different states (vibratory frequencies) that exist on different levels and phases of a continuum which works together as a singularity to create an image of itself, not as a body, but as the whole reality of the body where it experiences itself as a specific type of person living a certain kind of story.

What we commonly refer to as the conscious mind while within our body, is actually an aspect of the subconscious mind (brain consciousness), and can be more accurately referred to as the self-conscious mind that’s fully identified with being our body. This is due to the fact that this aspect of our mind is birthed fully within our material body and forms it’s identity out of the personality. This aspect of our self may be more appropriately thought of as the intellect which accompanies and is born out of the instinctual, emotional aspect of the subconscious through our natural development. While this forms our thinking, self-aware, rational mind while we’re in our body, it still remains completely unaware of our true identity as a fully conscious, self-aware being of a higher and more divine nature. This is the aspect of the lower mind that’s creative in terms of being able to shape an image of itself by how it associates with its material circumstances and natural status within those circumstances.

The intellectual aspect of the mind has the ability to direct and program its own instinctual, subconscious mind while in physical form through its own thoughts and how those thoughts are shaped into realities in the faculty of the imagination. Once an abstract idea is translated into a well-defined sensory reality that serves to naturally give rise to correlated emotions, it then serves as pattern or kind of thematic program that the subconscious can use in place of an actual memory to create a corresponding outer reality of the same nature. The subconscious is the unified mind of the material plane (collective unconscious mind) and is what takes an inner idea and organizes an outer experience of it. Due to the fact that we usually aren’t aware of this innate ability to create our own outer reality, we have a tendency instead to let our emotions and impulses run our thoughts and determine what we imagine and construct in our mind as a inner reality, and we create the reality of our emotional states and conditioning in an automatic fashion. Imaginary realities born out of emotional states are what’s commonly referred to as the illusions we form in place of objective reality where we simply replay the patterns of our past over and over without being aware of the fact that we can change them.

All movement between different planes (upper and lower, and inner and outer) and between the different aspects of our mind are conducted through the Law of Polarity. Polarity works out of the principle of vibration as the movement of energy between positive and negative aspects of the same thing. The active (masculine) component serves to enter into the passive receptor (feminine), and impregnates it with an idea in it’s seed form. This seed-idea is then gestated and developed into a physical reality on the inner plane by adapting it to the conditions of the outer plane, where it’s then birthed in a completely natural way. Due to the fact that the self-conscious mind is the active aspect of the subconscious on the physical plane, it can’t communicate directly with the conscious mind of the higher plane, which also resides in a primarily active state on that plane. For this reason, the subconscious (feminine aspect) is the medium and means of communication for both masculine aspects of the mind between the higher (mental) and lower (material) plane. All communication between our higher and lower self that’s of an intentional nature and meant to result in a modification to our physical reality, takes place within the passive and receptive component of the subconscious, and usually comes as a form of dream state.

An idea that we want to manifest as a part of our reality is formulated in the imagination and defined with the proper sensation that acts to naturally give rise to higher forms of emotion, and is reflected within the subconscious as a symbolic idea or inner reality, which is then communicated to the higher aspect of our conscious mind. The higher mind, upon receiving the request as a sensationalized inner representation, evaluates it from the perspective of the entire lower reality of karmic expression, and modifies it accordingly so it’s congruent with our life plan. This is the process commonly referred to as the Higher Self only working for the greater good of all involved, because it’s aware that the entire lower reality is actually being created by us as a means of administering our own karma in order to learn from it. We only acquire knowledge of our self through experience, which we’re also creating in a moment by moment fashion through our perception and how we naturally interpret the events of our life to give them meaning. This process allows us to become aware of what our karma is while also providing us with the opportunity for redeeming ourselves by exercising the mental powers necessary to transform the unconscious patterns that are forming all of our life experiences.

Our subconscious, being fundamentally passive in nature, doesn’t have the ability to actively produce original thoughts that aren’t a part of it’s original programming, and operates almost exclusively out of memory. What we refer to as our instinctual mind functions naturally out of memories of a universal nature that we draw on as a means of adapting to our current life situation in order to create a personalized version of the same basic idea. We come into life as a soul already programmed with the memory of our entire life plan in a latent state, which is then systematically prompted and activated through correlated outer events that serve to stimulate us in specific ways. As we create experiences out of our primary soul memory, we evolve and develop those memories to a new and more diverse form. Our self-conscious mind tends to form most of our thoughts out of our past as the memories of our present life conditioning, usually without realizing that it also has the creative ability to form brand new ideas that can be used as a means of transforming our existing reality. In order to program our subconscious with new ideas, we have to use our inner faculties in being able to form the ideas into a believable sensory reality, infused with strong emotion that mimics an actual memory.

Defining the Nature of our Higher Self

Our Higher Self isn’t something that’s outside of us or that presents itself as another entity or material form that we can perceive as being separate from us. It’s inside of us as a fundamental and essential part of our being. It’s the part of ourselves that we’re always talking to, discussing things with, praying to, and asking for guidance and help from. It’s the inner well from which we acquire all true knowledge, because knowledge in the objective sense of understanding the fundamental nature of reality, is actually knowledge of ourselves. This is because we’re the one creating our reality as the means of experiencing ourselves and coming to realize who we really are as a result of our experiences. In Christian Religions, the Higher Self is most commonly referred to as Christ or God. It’s the part of us we pray to for guidance and help in understanding things that cause us pain and suffering. We are God in the most basic sense, because God only exists within us and is only accessible through prayer and meditation.

Communication from our Higher Self comes through the subconscious where it’s reflected in the mirror of the mind as an inspired thought. Inspired means it isn’t a product of our habitual thought patterns and being generated from our current base of knowledge within our current life circumstances, but comes more as a brand new way of looking at something that allows us to see something that we couldn’t see before, and as a result, has an exhilarating quality to it. Inspiration comes with an amplified charge of energy that excites and enlivens us with possibilities. We don’t attain knowledge by channeling outside entities or personalities as a spirit guide or panel of supposed experts that we consult with for guidance, it comes by completely closing ourselves off from outside activity and stimulus of any kind, turning our full attention within, becoming fully present, and communicating with God as our Higher Power and primary Source. Knowing that all reciprocated communication will also come as a reflection in our mind, or as a fundamental event that shows up as a natural part of our outer reality, where we attain it through experience.

We only know our Self and God through direct experience that’s intimate in nature and comes as a connection of the inner with the outer, and the upper with the lower as being a continuation of the same thing. There’s no difference between what we know and what we experience directly. This is what Jesus meant when he taught, “when the outer becomes the same as the inner, and the inner becomes the same as the outer, you’ll have entered the gates of heaven”. The term heaven is referring to a higher sphere of consciousness where you create from a fully conscious state as your whole reality and you no longer perceive yourself as separate from your own creation. On what we call the higher plane of consciousness, the lower plane of material reality and personal existence is seen in its entirety as a unified whole. There’s no more division or sense of separation. While we have a tendency to think of the soul as being our body only, it’s actually what’s creating the entire lower plane of reality in which our body functions and lives and provides us with the means for experiencing ourselves.

Karma and the True Nature of Objective Reality

Our Higher Self is also the objective administrator of karma as a higher form of unconditional love. It’s only through redeeming ourselves of our unconscious programming and conditioning that we’re able to grow and become truly self-aware. We only truly learn and grow through experience, and our Higher Self is what organizes, arranges, and orchestrates all the situations, circumstances, and events where we play out unconscious tendencies without awareness of what we’re doing. It’s only by becoming aware of our own part in our life experiences that we can bring them into conscious awareness and begin utilizing our higher power in being able to transform them. We have to begin realizing what we’re doing and what our part is in the creation of our own life situations, so we can begin seeing them clearly from an objective and detached state, and act accordingly to break our own habitual patterns by making new decisions. The main objective to life is to wake-up within our own dream and realize that we’re the one creating it as a projection of our own subconscious based on patterns we formed during our formative conditioning as a child. Our Higher Self doesn’t interfere with this process by intervening on our part, but instead helps guide us through the process of awakening by instructing us in ways that expand our awareness and bring new realizations.

The cosmic will, which is the conscious aspect of our Higher Self, always works for the benefit of everyone involved in the greater whole, because it’s aware of the fact that we’re the one creating the whole (projecting our reality) as an experience born out of a primarily unconscious state. This means that we’re submerged within the experience of our own making while failing almost entirely to realize who we really are as the creator having the experience of our own creation. The only way we can work within a situation to transform it is by not only realizing who we really are as a higher being, but by also forming an understanding of how to work with our own mind on higher levels of awareness.

As we become conscious in situations we were normally unconscious in, we can begin seeing our own tendencies, and instead of blindly repeating them, we can make new decisions about who we’re going to be instead and act to transform our own experiences. As long as we’re locked inside the dream produced from as a habitual perception, we maintain the same personality and character traits, and replay the same patterns as a life theme that we’ve been conditioned with over and over, while never realizing or owning our own part in our story about things. As long as we continue to focus on other people while projecting onto them, and we perceive everything as being done to us by outside forces, we remain subject to them, which means we’re influenced and ultimately controlled by them. This locks us into the illusion of separation and we fail to realize that the inner and outer are actually a continuation and extension of each other, and form a self-perpetuating system out of cause and effect.

We can come to recognize this process because whatever it is we perceive as being an outer reality is actually being formed by our mental paradigm through our perception. The activities of the outer world serve to stimulate and call forth correlating qualities within us as a reaction. All action produces an equal or greater reaction of the same kind. Once the same qualities are actively expressing on both the inner and outer planes we enter into a state of sympathy and rapport with life, where our reaction then becomes the causal force that serves to re-stimulate them in the same way, and the energy moves back and forth, amplifying and building, and the dynamic as a pattern naturally inherent in the active qualities brought alive in both people serve to form a joint reality that gives both people a similar type of experience. The cause creates an equivalent effect, and the effect then becomes the cause that produces and amplified effect in the other, and it continues to go back and forth playing out as a dynamic that’s the expression of the shared qualities and characteristics. This back and forth movement is represented by the symbol of infinity (sideways 8) as a self-replicating, self-perpetuating, self-sustaining system.

The Voice Within

It may be difficult to determine when the voice speaking inside of us is that of our Higher Self, because we all have a whole set of what you can think of as sub-personalities, each of which has their own voice. Not as different voices, but as our own voice that takes on a different perspective and attitude. Our own ordinary thinking comes as an inner dialogue that’s continuous in nature as our very thoughts. You can tell when it’s the voice of your Higher Self because it’s always unemotional, unbiased, and completely rational. It’s intuitive in the sense that’s it’s always addressing life and reality as a whole, rather than a selfish or personal aspect of a specialized version. It utilizes your own voice, commanded by a higher, sober, parent-like mind. It never violates choice and free will, and only instructs or guides you by showing you things about a person or situation that you’re currently not aware of so you to make more realistic and accurate decisions. It gives you guidance by expanding your awareness around something, providing you with new information attained from a different perspective that will help you in being able to make better, and more well-rounded decisions.

The voice of your true Higher Self never violates or oversteps choice and free will by telling you what to do or by making decisions for you, it simply brings new insights, while also providing you with the moral strength to see those decisions through to fruition. It never addresses or comes from a place of honoring and validating your personal insecurities, self-doubt, emotional fantasies, or perceived limitations, but acts always to bring you back into your center with a sober mindset that’s very practical and grounding. It’s intuitive in the sense that it’s all-knowing and tuned into the greater reality as the combination of past, present, and future as a singularity or continuum. It connects us through an elusive bridge that tunes us into a higher mental state where we can see the whole picture while also being confined within it. It’s the veil that’s sheer and semi-translucent, and the impressions attained through can often seem vague, fleeting, and come as more of a daydream.

Due to the fact that our inner voice is of a divine nature and resides on a higher plane that oversees and orchestrates this one, it often includes prophecy. It does this in the most natural sense by revealing the true inner nature of things and how it is that they’ll play out as a series of events that are all apart of the same cycle. This process works by natural law and comes as internal images which either warn of us of impending danger, give us more information by directing our attention onto areas we normally ignore, through a discussion that’s educational in nature, or as a momentary view into the future, usually presented in universal symbols and metaphorical images that require us to discern them. It brings new insights that normally exist outside of our mental paradigm that show us new things about what’s really going on beneath the surface of things that we can’t see otherwise. It comes as what we call the witnessing faculty of our mind, which functions from a third person perspective as not being directly involved, yet on the outskirts of the situation observing if from a detached and rational perspective.

Tuning into the Bigger Picture of the All

The human personality is shaped by and completely dependent on the whole of reality as the All. Once this truth is honestly realized and it’s implications embraced the only intelligent course of action is to completely surrender the lower personality of your body to a higher purpose. This surrender of our lower self to our higher self , begins in the mind as the submission of the personal consciousness to the direction of our universal and non-personal mind. This comes most naturally through the realization that all of our true power is derived from above. The surrender of our personal life to Life itself makes us intensely positive energetically in relation to other persons and to the conditions of our environment. Awareness of the power that transcends personal power always results in a positive mental attitude. As soon as we let go of our personal will and begin perceiving through a broader and more universal level of consciousness, we realize that all of our pain and suffering is actually self-inflicted due to our perception of imaginary limitations and selfish endeavors that are unconscious motivations born out of our formative conditioning.

The personality of our body and genetic makeup combined with the evolved memory of our universal soul (acquired through many different personalities and life conditions) forms the marriage for what’s developed in us through our initial conditioning. Our family dynamics are created by those who share the same ancestral memory and natural tendencies that naturally ensue from the active expression of the same group dynamics. We’re born into a group situation of shared character traits and behavioral dynamics that serve to activate and bring into expression the shared aspects as dominant qualities, which are then shaped into thematic patterns that are harmoniously interwoven and synthesized to form our mental paradigm. Our mental paradigm is constructed out of memory that forms the perceptual lens we look through and naturally use as the means of creating more realities of the same nature and kind.

Formative patterns are initially established out of partial qualities that were brought forth and developed in us by playing out certain dynamics, while others remain latent and unused. Our formative conditioning sets the basis for our personal will which is conducted from a primarily unconscious state and is what recreates the same habitual patterns over and over, where we act on ourselves to administer our own pain and suffering. When we resist life as a free-flowing stream of consciousness, and work instead to build a wall around a small area as a limited idea about ourselves, we confine ourselves to a prison of our own making where we feel helpless to get out because we can’t see over or beyond our own wall and don’t realize there’s another whole idea playing out just beyond our ability to perceive it.

When we connect intuitively with our Higher Self and we’re able to realize that as a personality confined to a body we’re powerless in the most basic sense of expanding our awareness to be able to see the bigger picture playing out harmoniously all around us as a coherent whole, and we realize that our life experiences are produced through this larger whole, we begin slowly comprehending the meaning of a higher power and Will to work through the whole as a universal process rather than an individual one. With this awareness we’re able to begin detaching from our personal conditioning and self-motivated actions, and instead surrender our personal will to our higher will. When we form an inner connection to our higher source of power, we no longer need to get power from others and an outside source. We start engaging in everything without needing to get anything from it, and we take an attitude of giving or bringing something to our life situations instead. We begin thinking about what’s best for everyone involved in any situation rather than what we want and imagine we need from it.

When we no longer feel compelled to try and have our needs met by others, or attain power from trying to control them somehow, we experience a kind of newfound freedom. We refrain from exerting our dominance in trying to direct and control others and our situation, and enter into the flow of the moment instead, and as a result, begin sensing ourselves in new and more conscious ways. We begin going with life instead of resisting it. Instead of asking for things for our self when we pray and commune with our higher power, we begin asking to be an instrument in the objective administration the higher, universal will that works for the highest good of everyone involved. As we do this, we begin cultivating compassion in place of judgment, and start forming a natural attitude of serving others.

The Unified Field of the Astral Plane

What’s commonly referred to as the Akashic Field is what we can think of as the etheric double constructed out of accumulated, homogenized group memory (karma) that forms the blueprint for the shared reality of humanity as a whole. All organized form as a living matrix requires a blueprint that’s used for not only constructing it, but also for determining how it functions as a growth process that evolves it to different levels of development or towards a prophesied means. Just as our physical form and life story is formed out of our etheric-double as the seed of our karma, so is all of humanity and the unified story of the human drama being played out globally. Our Higher Self, which is the aspect of our conscious awareness that never fully manifests into the lower plane of material reality, while acting to oversee and direct it, exists on a plane or conscious level that’s above this one (a hierarchical structure of kingdoms), and is what fashions its own etheric vehicle as a holographic model that serves to play out its individual karma within the larger dynamic of group and global karma.

When we receive intuitive guidance from our higher self, it pertains to preparing us for what’s coming which, being within the larger drama, we can’t see and therefore don’t know is coming. Sometimes the guidance, which is felt as an inner knowing that often lacks context, makes sense to us at our present level of awareness, and sometimes it doesn’t. It often guides us in letting go of things we still have an attachment to, and so there’s an immediate conflict of interest, and as a result, we begin second guessing it or doubting its validity, and often either end up ignoring it completely and keep going in favor of our attachments, or we begin debating and skewing it to fit our needs for maintaining the situation we’re involved in instead.

This natural tendency to doubt away the guidance that’s been clearly realized, not only causes us to inflict and subject ourselves to emotional pain and mental suffering in our own life, when it plays out just as we intuitively knew it would, we feel like a fool for not trusting it. It can be quite destructive in the sense that it often breaks down the illusion we were living by making it so obvious we can no longer maintain it. This is because our higher self is operating in a fully conscious state on a higher plane and sees the material plane in its entirety. It’s the administrator of the reality that’s built into our life-design, and knows how every aspect of our life will play out and what will result from any relationship and situation.

Divine Providence and Personal Destiny

Our life is formed as an ongoing story orchestrated through a dynamic series of precisely correlated events that are inherent in our soul’s design and built into our etheric blueprint, which is our subconscious mind. This serves to not only form our body and personality and our perception of reality, it also plays out our whole life story in a systematic and somewhat predictable way through the automatic decisions we make on a moment by moment basis and the timing through which events transpire in a synchronized fashion. We’re placed in a specific time and location within an ongoing drama and a group situation that shares the same type karma as smaller patterns playing out harmoniously within larger patterns of the same kind, all of which correspond and set the stage necessary to play out our personal story in a completely natural and spontaneous way. We all play a role in various dynamics as thematic life-patterns that create congruently on many different levels simultaneously. Our personal expression as a reality plays out perfectly within a universal reality of a similar tone. We have many different levels and scales of karma, all of which are born from the same cosmic seed as a universal theme.

Our exact time of birth, astrological birth chart, and location within the ongoing story of humanity, is calculated with extreme accuracy through harmonics as vibration. This strategic placement within the space-time continuum of reality is perfect because it’s based on sympathetic resonance. Where we are at any given moment and what it is we’re experiencing and having to deal with is exactly what we need in order to grow and is precisely what’s meant to be. There’s no effort required on our part because it’s a fundamental part of our initial programming. Our life flows in a completely natural and spontaneous way. All reality as we’re capable of perceiving it functions as a harmonious whole. An elaborate, complex, and eloquent movement that’s in perfect tune with everything else. It’s what you might think of as a kind of holo-movement. A hologram that’s alive and real as a unified reality and always playing out around us with us at it’s center.

There’s no such thing as a separate, independent, little pattern playing out within larger patterns of a different and dissonant nature, because they won’t propagate naturally through the unified field of consciousness. A particle (individual) has it’s existence as a life experience within the reality of it’s parent wave. The individual is but one possibility that’s a fundamental and essential part of the larger whole in which it has it’s existence as a specified type of experience. So everything that’s happening inside of you as an imaginary thought-process has it’s complementary aspect outside of you as a correspondence. What makes this confusing to understand in the practical sense is because the inner imagining as thoughts that are turned into pictures, serve a symbolic representation that’s used as a kind of metaphor for structuring the outer reality as a coherent theme. The outer sets the stage for the inner to play out as an experience of our thoughts. There’s no difference outside of degree and scale. You could think of yourself as an archetypal being (formulated originally in your astrological birth chart) who’s natural life expression plays out as a specific kind of myth as the means of experiencing yourself.

Intuitive guidance, which comes as an inner knowing about something that’s felt and not self-generated out of habitual perceptions of the past, comes from an intrinsic awareness of the entire lower reality as having already been created. It doesn’t come so much as a warning, as many believe, but as a means of calling our attention to the underlying nature of things so we can begin forming an awareness around what normally eludes us due to the fact that we live most of our life from a semi-unconscious state. Intuition, in the most fundamental sense is designed to expand our awareness around the hidden nature of things and always connects us to the greater reality simultaneously playing out as a moment by moment unfoldment. It allows us to form realizations around the invisible aspects of life and the internal forces motivating how everything acts and interacts, and the course their reality takes as a result. It’s a kind of bleed-through of a higher level of consciousness designed to make us aware in areas we’re normally unaware so we can begin cultivating conscious awareness in areas we normally function in an unconscious manner while a part of them. It moves us from perceiving the outer appearances of things to connecting with the inner soul of them instead.

We can know if it’s truly guidance from our higher self because it’s not a product of our conditioning as unconscious patterns we continuously play out in a completely natural and habitual way without realizing it. It moves us instead out of our limited, self-generated perspective and into an expanded form of objective awareness which, when honored and followed, serves to keep us awake and aware in dynamics we usually engage in without direct awareness of what we’re doing and why. As we become aware of aspects of our reality that we’re normally not aware of, the awareness itself begins dismantling the habitual pattern associated with it, freeing us to form new realizations that lay the groundwork for making new decisions.

Intuitive guidance from our higher level of consciousness aids us in being able to stay awake in our daily life and aware of the hidden nature of things as a harmonious blending of intellect and instinct, so we can make calculated decisions regarding them, and exercise our will in being able to transform them, resolving our karma as a natural consequence. When we ignore our intuition in favor of our own self-generated perceptions that keeps us repeating the same patterns as unconscious tendencies born out of our conditioning, and creating more of the same realities as the past, we stay locked into creating our life from a conditioned, habitual and unconscious state, without realizing we have the power within to wake up in our own dream, and begin directing it.

One of the most basic paradoxes comes from the fact that when we invest in the outer appearance of things as being real and therefore true, we perceive from an unconscious state, and when we shift instead to sensing the inner nature of things and what it is that’s motivating their activities, we begin perceiving from a fully conscious state. The term consciousness isn’t referring to our awareness of the outer appearance of material forms, but the inner nature as the underlying reality being played out as a soul to soul connection that gives rise to new realizations about ourselves and everyone else. True consciousness as a fully awake and self-aware state is an attribute of the higher soul, and not the body (brain) consciousness of the personality. Our body is simply a medium as a feedback mechanism that allows us to experience our own thoughts as an outer reality.

Dr. Linda Gadbois

Transpersonal Psychologist, Personal Transformation Coach, and Spiritual Teacher