Understanding "Not-Self" and the Soul's Journey: Reconciling Buddhist Philosophy with the Concept of the Higher Self

Over the years, as part of my personal and professional development, I’ve immersed myself not only in medicine and energy work but also in philosophy, depth psychology, and the wisdom of the great initiates. Thinkers like Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, and the early Buddhist teachers have deepened the way I understand healing, identity, and consciousness. Recently, in a session with a client, a beautiful and complex question emerged: how can we reconcile the Buddhist principle of not-self with the idea of a higher self or soul journey?

This is the longer version of the answer I gave in the moment. I told them that when I’m anchored in my higher self, I experience the essence of not-self—not as a void, but as a profound connectedness. In that state, there is no rigid “me,” yet everything feels deeply intimate and alive. My external reality is me: the trees are me, and I am the trees. There’s no separation, only flow. By contrast, when I’m in ego or personality self, I feel isolated, fragmented, and reactive. The boundary becomes more rigid, and suffering tends to arise. And I encouraged him to move from meditating indoors to outside in nature and to extend his question to the energy around him- to notice his experience and reflect on this.

This writing is an attempt to articulate how these two perspectives—higher self and not-self—can be more than compatible; they can, in fact, be two ways of pointing to the same truth.The Buddhist teaching of anattā, or “not-self,” is often initially experienced as paradoxical—especially when held alongside frameworks from Western esoteric traditions that speak of a higher self, past lives, or a soul's journey. In classical Theravāda Buddhism, the doctrine of not-self challenges the notion of a permanent, unchanging identity. The self is viewed as a collection of ever-changing processes—body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness (the five aggregates). These arise and pass away moment by moment, and no abiding essence is found within them. This insight is not nihilistic, but liberating. By seeing through the illusion of a fixed self, one becomes less bound by attachment, aversion, and suffering.

However, in many western Esoteric teachings—including those rooted in energy work and transpersonal psychology—there is recognition of a continuity that persists across lifetimes: often referred to as the soul, higher self, or true essence. This ‘soul’ is not a fixed ego identity, but rather a deeper layer of awareness or consciousness that retains memory, wisdom, and karmic impressions over multiple incarnations. In this view, life is part of a broader arc of learning and evolution, a journey through lifetimes with meaning and direction.

Rather than being contradictory, these two perspectives can be held in a complementary way. The not-self points to the impermanence and constructed nature of the personality self—what we might call the ego, the conditioned self, or the persona. The higher self, by contrast, may be seen as that which observes the unfolding of experience across time, the awareness that remains when identification with the ego-self dissolves. One could say that in truly understanding anattā, we make room for communion with the higher self—not as a discrete individual entity, but as a luminous field of consciousness.

What I’ve come to understand is that only by exploring why the ego formed, where it was shaped, and what it has been trying to protect, can we begin to loosen its grip. The ego clings to form, to story, to separation as a protective mechanism developed along the journey and these must be explored in order to be let go- this exploration with curiosity and compassion can therefore, lead to ego death (or ego-layer death as I like to call it) . The higher self, by contrast, is spacious, connected, and quietly observant- leading us forward through lessons with the goal of 'awakening'. And in the space beyond ego, the truth of not-self begins to emerge—not as a loss of self, but as a return to wholeness.

Perhaps these teachings are not in conflict at all, but are pointing us toward the same doorway: one that invites us to surrender who we think we are, in order to remember what we truly are.

So I leave you with this: what would it mean to live from that place—not defined by ego, but rooted in total awareness and connected?

What might shift, if you, just for a second, allowed yourself to become the trees?