Ask the Patriarch

from: Doug Smith

Could we agree that what I call Spirit, others call Higher Self?

The Patriarch replies:

Doug:

I’m not sure of your intentions here — of whether you intended this as an addition to your previous comments, a response to something else on the site, or as a serious stand-alone question to me. Either way, there’s insufficient context — the question comes out of the blue and I don’t know what you are getting at. And though I gave you an opportunity to clarify… I’ve heard nothing further. So I can just ramble on…

As I don’t know what you mean by “Spirit” and I don’t know what you think others mean by “Higher Self”, I can indeed agree that it is quite possible that you and at least some others use the terms interchangeably.

But what do I know? I lack first hand experience with pretty well all supernatural entities. Sure — I can look up definitions and get an idea of what people are referring to — but the concepts of soul, spirit, higher self are just like gods, fairies, and woodland sprites. I have not directly experienced any of them.

But I can at least manage to look up Higher Self and Spirit on Wikipedia. I can see an overlap in the terms. Whether they have any applicability in the material world in which I live, I don’t know. I’m agnostic.

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