The Higher Self

Photo Credit: The Muse in the Mirror

 

The Higher Self

It is not easy to understand what ‘higher Self means’; nor can we know what the lower self is. Though we may repeat these words again and again, and to some extent know their literal meanings, their practical suggestiveness is hard for the mind to grasp. The higher Self is not a spatially located, ascending series, but a more intensely inclusive and pervasive nature of our own self – something like the superiority of the waking consciousness over the dream consciousness.

The waking mind is not kept over the dreaming mind, as one thing kept over another thing. The superiority, the transcendence of one thing over the other, or one thing being higher than the other, should not and does not suggest a spatial distance, but a logical superiority which is to be distinguished from spatial transcendence as someone sitting over another person's head. The cosmological scheme enlightens us into the fact that we as individuals or human beings are basically inseparable from the whole of creation, the five elements: earth, water, fire, air, ether; the five tanmatras: word, touch, form, taste, smell; and the whole of space-time itself. We are not outside this large complex of the expanse of the universe.

We, in our daily life, seem to be totally ignoring this fact; and by a complete violation of this principle, asserting our individuality; we seem to be totally disconnected from everything else as if we have nothing to do with anybody else. We have various types of selfishness – attachment to one's own body is the grossest form of it, and it has subtler forms of egoism, such as psychological self-assertiveness. Attachment to anything that is connected to one's self also comes under the purview and the gamut of selfishness.

We are totally sense-ridden, and the world that we live in is a sense world. Our thinking process and our intellect also is conditioned by the knowledge provided to us by means of sense perception.

Our individualised consciousness is the principle of the affirmation of individuality. The ego, the intellect, the reasoning, and what we think we are at the present moment – all these are inseparable from this type of activity of consciousness. Thus, self-control would mean a bringing back of the surging individual consciousness in the direction of external things, and enabling it to settle in its own self. This is the whole yoga of Patanjali, for instance, which summarises in two sutras – yogaś citta vṛtti nirodhaḥ and tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe avasthānam (Y.S. 1.2-3). "The restraint of the mind is yoga, and then there is establishment of self in its own self." Here is the whole of yoga in two sentences.

The lower self is that state of consciousness which is conditioned by the urge in the direction of objects. The higher Self is that which is the condition of freedom, attained by even a single step taken by this involved consciousness in the direction of disentanglement with objects.

Detachment is a success that we achieve in freeing our consciousness from involvement in any kind of objectivity – whether it is the form of intense liking or intense dislike, or finally even in the complacency that things really are outside. This ultimately leads us to being one with our Higher Self and the Universe.