Spirit and the Higher Self

It is worth saying what I mean by two of the words I use most, spirit and the higher self.

Spirit

Our home is the spirit world. We choose to come to this physical plane to learn.

The part of you that makes that choice is your spirit being. It is an energy body. When it comes into a life, it attaches itself to the baby, and from that moment the two of you are joined until the body dies, at which point you return home.

The way I describe the joining is a globe in a lamp. The lamp is the body. On its own it sits there. When the globe goes in and the switch is on, the whole thing lights up. That light is you.

Pregnant women are often called glowing. Is it any wonder, when they are carrying their own inner light and the inner light of the baby at the same time?

That glow is what people see as the aura, although what we see is a human filtered view of it. The Seeing Auras page goes into that properly.

The moment of forgetting

At the moment of human connection your consciousness becomes human, with all of the limitations that come with it.

This is the actor on the stage choosing to forget their life off the stage and focus only on the character's life. You arrive knowing a great deal, and almost straight away you forget most of it.

So you are an unlimited spiritual being living in a physical body, having forgotten many things to be here, and you can remember them by the path you choose. Most of what I teach is a set of ways to help that remembering along.

The higher self

Your higher self is not limited by the earthly incarnation you are living in this lifetime. It sees and knows what you came to learn, and it knows what governs the fragile human ego. It is still you.

The picture I use for it is a play.

When you watch a great play in a theatre, you agree to get caught up in the story. You know it is not real, and yet you laugh, you cry, you love as the story unfolds. If it is a favourite, you might see it more than once and learn more of the story each time, or even pick it apart looking for the mistakes. You know the whole script already exists, every page of it, at the same moment. You choose to follow along anyway, because that is how you get the experience.

Now imagine the play is called your life.

You are on the stage doing your best to play the part of you. You have taken the role seriously and agreed to treat the whole thing as very real. The dramas, the tragedies, the love, the laughter.

You are also in the audience. That is your higher self. The audience member knows none of it is real, and came anyway, because the play is worth seeing.

When the play ends, when you pass over, the actor you talks with the other actors and you all share what you went through. Then the actor you meets the audience you backstage. You talk about what it meant. You talk about it from the stage and from the seats. Your soul grows from both sides of that experience, and then you decide whether you want to repeat it or go and have another adventure.

The higher self on the rooftop

The higher self does not only wait in the seats until the end. It talks to you while the play is running.

Picture yourself driving through a city. You can see the buildings around you, the road ahead and the road behind. You cannot see through the buildings to the roads that cross yours.

Out of nowhere you get an urge to slow down. There is no reason for it. You slow down anyway, and twenty seconds later a truck with no brakes comes through the intersection on a red light and cleans up the car in front of you, and not you.

Your higher self was sitting on top of the building. It could see the truck. It sent the only message it could in the time it had, and hoped you would listen.

The messages are not always warnings. Sometimes they are about amazing things. Either way, all of us, me included, have been given guidance we knew we should listen to and then talked ourselves out of. Learning to tell that voice from the noise in your own head is what the Monkey Mind page is for.

Guides and the higher self

I met my guide, Melissa, in my twenties. For years I saw her as a separate being, and I can still chat with her today. Much later I challenged what I believed about guides and came to understand that she is my higher self. She appeared as a separate being at a time when I would have filtered a direct connection through my understanding of life back then, and it would have slowed me down.

When you meet a guide, you are meeting a being your higher self has created as the right balance for who you are in this life. Some people have one. Some have several. The Your Guides page tells that story in full, along with how to meet yours.

Both at once

We are all one. But we are not. But we are.

It is a bit of a mind job. From the spirit side, we are all part of the oneness that makes up the universe, and through the higher self we can connect to any part of it. From the human side, we came with an agreement to be individuals, learning individual lessons for a higher purpose, and that purpose is to return to the oneness we are part of. Except we are already part of it. And yet we are individuals, with our own thoughts and feelings and experiences.

A lot of people on this path get stuck trying to work out which one is true. The easiest way forward is to accept that you are both at the same time, and that you can connect to either side, or both, whenever you choose.

Keeping the balance

If you focus too much on your higher self and not enough on grounding, your growth stalls. If you put all your focus on grounding and none on the higher self, the same thing happens from the other direction.

The balance lets you be in the moment, present in your body, and centred whatever is going on around you. That is the best set of tools you can have when life throws a challenge at you. With time and experience you will find the balance that suits you. The Grounding page is where I set out the body half of it.

Where do you exist

As you read these words, where are you?

Are you the words in your head as your eyes move along the line? The feelings you get? The body you are sitting in? Or is the body a vessel that lets your spirit being take part in this physical plane?

All of those answers are right, depending on how you look at it, and each of them needs looking after. You are a being of light who came into this physical plane to fulfil the reason you came here. All of those parts are you, and all of them deserve your attention every day.

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.

Related pages
Why You Are Here