The Higher Self

There's a voice inside your head that you think is you. And it isn't. At least not the most real honest part of you.

It sounds like you. It uses your words. It knows every fear you've ever had because it helped you build them. And for most of your life, you've been trusting it, taking its notes on the big decisions and the small ones, letting it explain why you shouldn't say the thing or go after the thing, and calling that wisdom.

It's not.

Two Selves

We have two selves. A higher self and a lower self.

Christians have been talking about this for two thousand years, they call it the true self and the false self, or the spirit and the flesh, depending on which translation you grew up with. Jung called it the shadow and the authentic self. Every serious tradition that's ever looked hard at being human has landed on the same conclusion, which is that there is more than one voice in there, and they want very different things.

Think of it like this, the lower self is a bucket with a hole in the bottom. You can pour money and success and validation into it all day long and it drains right out, which explains roughly 80% of the self-help industry and maybe 99% of Instagram.

The higher self is a spring. It produces from within. It already knows it's enough, so it moves. It doesn't argue with you, it just tells you the truth and waits for you to catch up. It's like you happening to the world instead of the world happening to you.

I met mine one Tuesday afternoon in an 84 Camaro, driving home on Route 77 with Alabama on the radio.

The Speech Class

If we're friends or you've ever heard me talk, you know I have a stutter. I don't have good hair days or bad hair days, just good speech days and bad ones.

I've learned to work with it over the years, it's been tricky, and when I was a kid it ran my life. This is very likely why my entire childhood was a system for avoiding fear. I got really good at it.

I could talk teachers out of in-class speeches in two minutes flat, which is its own kind of public speaking skill if you think about it, but I wasn't thinking about it at the time.

I was the classic underachiever, never putting myself out there, never going after anything big, always quitting, always living with fear in my heart and letting it make almost all my decisions.

Then I got to college speech class and ran into a professor who said no. She didn't say "I'll think about it." She just said no. The speech was required, the class was required, and I was going to have to stand up there and do the thing I'd spent fourteen years building an elaborate avoidance architecture around.

Honestly? Part of me was excited. Finally, somebody was saying you have to climb this mountain, you have to slay this dragon, it's time. I was going to kill the monster right there in front of my classmates.

I practiced that speech for two weeks. Knew every word. Drove to school that morning giving myself a pep talk. Walked in feeling great.

Then she called my name.

I walked up to the podium, looked down at my first index card, opened my mouth, and nothing. And I don't mean slow, I mean nothing. I got through maybe two sentences on the first card and that was it.

The muscles in my neck tightened up like steel cables and my breathing went from normal to short gasps, which if you've ever watched someone stutter under pressure is a feedback loop you can't escape from.

The harder it gets to talk, the harder it gets to breathe, and the harder it gets to breathe, the harder it gets to talk.

Then I made the mistake. I looked up at the audience.

Every single person who had been looking at me suddenly looked down at their desks. The people who weren't fast enough, well, when I made eye contact I felt their sorrow. I really felt it, which made it even worse…

They were embarrassed for me and they wanted to look away and they just couldn't get their eyes down in time.

It was like drowning while everybody on the shore watched and nobody could do anything but find something fascinating in the sand and pretending they weren't paying attention.

After about ten minutes of this, my professor strolls over, puts her hand on my shoulder and gently walks me back to my seat.

I don't remember anything else about that class. It was a blur.

I just remember walking out to my Camaro and starting the drive home, and the voice in my head absolutely destroying me.

I wasn't suicidal. But I understood for the first time in my life how someone could want the pain to just stop.

Then I turned on the radio.

The Voice I'd Never Heard Before

There was a song playing. "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down," by Alabama.

Like why was this playing right now, in this moment.

I just listened to the words for a few moments and then something broke open in me right there in the front seat of that Camaro.

This massive wave of gratitude. I had never felt anything like this before in my life, like God shot a bolt of lightning through my t-top right into my chest and everything good about my life came pouring through all at once.

My girlfriend loved me. A family who believed in me. A job at $5.25 an hour that was keeping me in school. The fact that I could walk and run and see and hear and feel things, the good and the bad together, all of it, here, at the same time.

And then a different voice spoke up. A quieter one, not the one that had been hammering me ten minutes earlier, a voice I'd never really heard before. And what it said was:

I think I then answered, Wait what, that was it?

If I could put a thousand question marks after that sentence, I would. That was the thing you've been avoiding your whole life? That was the catastrophe you've organized your entire existence around?

You stood up there, you stuttered, some people looked uncomfortable, and then you walked to your car. Nobody died. The world didn't end. You felt terrible for ten minutes and now you can see truth.

I realized something I had never seen before.

My lower self had been lying to me the entire time.

Almost EVERY decision I had ever made was based on fear, every shortcut around discomfort, every elaborate workaround to avoid the hard thing, all of it was built on a lie.

That voice telling me something catastrophic would happen if I tried had been wrong my whole life. It had just been loud enough and consistent enough that I'd never bothered to question it.

And right there, in the middle of what had been the worst day of my life a half hour earlier, I made a decision I didn't have the words for yet. I was done letting that voice drive.

The Question That Changes Everything

The stutter didn't go away, by the way. I still have it. Nothing got magically fixed in that car, because the moment wasn't about the stutter. It was about the voice.

And the voice is still there. My lower self didn't disappear the day I met my higher self.

That's not how any of this works. The lower self is human, it's not going anywhere, but once you've met the other voice underneath it, everything changes, because now you can ask the only question that really matters.

Which part of me is actually making this decision?

You stand at a crossroads, you feel the pull to play it safe, you feel yourself reaching for the familiar excuse, and you stop for a second and ask. Is this my higher self talking, or is this my lower self trying to make a really good argument?

Most of the time you'll know the answer before you finish asking. Your lower self has a specific flavor to it. It's anxious in a way that sounds reasonable and self-protective in a way that sounds smart, and it's always pointing at the door marked "less life."

Your higher self doesn't argue with you, it just tells you the truth, and it points at the door marked "more life" and waits for you to walk through it.

I spent the first nineteen years of my life with my lower self behind the wheel. I've spent the thirty years since learning to let my higher self drive, and I'm still not perfect. I still catch my lower self sneaking back into the driver's seat, usually when I'm tired or scared or both. But I know who it is now. And that changes everything.

The worst parts of my life have been dominated by my lower self.

The best parts, you guessed it, ALL higher self.

What do you think when I say this?

A part of you is perfect.

Like how do you react to that? How do you feel?

I am absolutely amazed at how polarizing that idea is for people. Do you think it's TRUE or FALSE.

If false then you don't believe me right now, and I hate to break it to you, your lower self is running your life.

There is a divinely inspired part of you and me that is perfect. It's strong, loving, true, and confident. And the quality of your entire life depends on how much of your life you give it.

Start living from that part.

Reading it and hearing it are two completely different experiences.

Live Free,
Greg