Just about every day, I walk past the office of a “Higher Self therapist”, an individual who claims to be able to put you in touch with your Higher Self to effect psychological treatments. This gentleman is far from the only person out there promising that knowing your Higher Self is the cure for all of your anxiety, depression, smoking habit, and difficulty socializing. A whole New Age movement exists to go one better: the magical powers to get everything you want in life without effort are available just by knowing this Higher Self.
I’m not even ridiculing, at this point. The issue is that what, exactly, this Higher Self actually is has always been kept rather vague. The core problem with the majority of occult spirituality is just this ambiguity. We must be able to define our terms and objectives in order to have anything like a path to walk. It is up to each of us to make these definitions, but if we neglect to do so, we’re just wandering ghosts.
When we speak of higher and lower selves at all, we are unconsciously reifying such ghosts. We are haunting the forests of our lived experience with phantoms. Instead of fearsome trolls and ogres, however, we are recruiting attractive faeries to our woods — beings who seduce us, get us lost, offer us food which turns to soil and leaves in our bellies, make prophecies to us which hold true until they actually matter. When we project a Higher Self, we are doing no different than many religious people do when they worship a God who already happens to agree with all of their political views and who is angry about all of the things which make his followers anxious and afraid.
In so many words, a Higher Self, as usually spoken of, is little more than one’s own ego expanded to global, even cosmic, proportions.
There is nothing wrong with having an ego; an “I-am-ness” is inevitable, and quite necessary to life. Ego, individuality, personality — the necessities rejected and supposedly “killed” by New Age and psychedelics spiritualists, while paradoxically being inflated by them to boundless significance under a new name — are expressions of the Divine Sakti. We know the Self not by denying or killing the ego, nor by imagining some greater version of it which shares our priorities. We do so by expanding our perspective beyond our existing priorities. And any “Self” we find who reinforces our anxieties or sense of superiority is not itself a failure, but another chance to inquire more deeply.